“Poor Stella,” “dear Stella,” “poor soul,” break into his letters--break, doubtless, into his speech on solitary walks; but in others’ presence his dignity and coldness are all assured. There is rarely breakdown where man or woman can see him. Old Dr. Sheridan[116] says that at the last she appealed to him to declare and make public their private marriage; whereat he “turned short away.” A more probable story is that in those last days Swift himself proposed public declaration, to which the dying woman could only wave a reply--“too late!” She died in 1728: he in the sixty-second year of his age, and she forty-eight. He would have written about her the night she died; had the curtains drawn that he might not see the light where her body lay; but he broke down in the writing. They brought a lock of her hair to him. It was found many years after in an old envelope, worn with handling, with this inscription on it--in his hand--_Only a woman’s hair_. I have not much more to say of Dean Swift, whose long story has kept us away from gentler characters, and from verses more shining than his. Indeed, I do not think the poems of Swift are much read nowadays; surely none but a strong man and a witty one could have written them; but they do not allure us. Everybody, however, remembers with interest the little people that Lemuel Gulliver saw, and will always associate them with the name of Swift. But if the stormy Dean had known that his Gulliver book would be mostly relished by young folks, only for its story, and that its tremendous satire--which he intended should cut and draw blood--would have only rarest appreciation, how he would have raved and sworn! They tell us he had private prayers for his household, and in secluded places; and there are those who sneer at this--“as if a Dean should say prayers in a crypt!” But shall we utterly condemn the poor Publican who--though he sells drams and keeps selling them--smites his bosom _afar off_ and cries, God be merciful!--as if there were a bottom somewhere that might be reached, and stirred, and sparkle up with effervescence of hope and truth and purity? He was a man, I think, who would have infinitely scorned and revolted at many of the apologies that have been made for him. To most of these he would have said, in his stentorian way, “I am what I am; no rosy after-lights can alter this shape of imperfect manhood; wrong, God knows; who is not? But a prevaricator--pretending feeling that is not real--offering friendship that means nothing--proffering gentle words, for hire; never, never!”