And in that great Court of Justice--which I am old-fashioned enough to believe will one day be held--where juries will not be packed, and where truth will shine by its own light, withstanding all perversion--and where opportunities and accomplishment will be weighed in even scales against possible hindrances of moral or of physical make-up--there will show, I am inclined to think, in the strange individuality of Swift, a glimmer of some finer and higher traits of Character than we are accustomed to assign him. After Stella’s death he wrote little:[117] perhaps he furbished up the closing parts of _Gulliver_; there were letters to John Gay, light and gossipy; and to Pope, weightier and spicier. But the great tree was dying at the top. He grew stingier and sterner, and broke into wild spasms of impatience, such as only a diseased brain could excuse and explain. His loneliness became a more and more fearful thing to be borne; but who shall live with this half-mad man of gloom? At length it is only a hired keeper who can abide with him: yet still he is reckless, proud, defiant, merciless, with no words coming to his fagged brain whereby he may express his thought; having thoughts, but they were bitter ones; having penitences maybe, but very vain ones; having remorses--ah, what abounding ones! Finally he has no longer the power, if the grace were in him, to ask pardon of the humanity he has wronged; or to tell of the laments--if at that stage he entertained them--over the grave of thwarted purposes and of shattered hopes; condemned to that imbecile silence which overtook him at last, and held him four weary years in fool’s grasp, suffering and making blundering unintelligible moans. He died in 1745--twenty-two years after Vanessa’s death--seventeen years after the death of Stella. FOOTNOTES [1] Sir Walter Raleigh, b. 1552; executed 1618. [2] Unless we except _The Ocean to Cynthia_, piquant fragments of which exist, extending to some five hundred lines; the poem, by the estimate of Mr. Gosse, may have reached in its entirety a length of ten thousand lines. See _Athenæum_ for January 2, 1886; also, _Raleigh_ (pp. 44-48) by Edmund Gosse. London, 1886. [3] William Harrison, b. 1534; d. 1593. It is interesting to know that much has come to light respecting the personal history of William Harrison, through the investigations of that indefatigable American genealogist, the late Colonel J. L. Chester. [4] _Speeches of Gratulation_ on King’s Entertainment. [5] Rawdon Brown. [6] _Judith Shakespeare_, by William Black. The story of the royal letter appears to rest mainly on the evidence of William Oldys (not a strong authority), who says it originated with Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, who had it from Sir William D’Avenant. Dr. Drake, however, as well as Farmer, fully accredit the anecdote.