Hester Johnson was a child of seven when young Swift, “the humble student,” went first to Moor Park. She was only fifteen when he returned, no longer as a sort of educated man of all work, but on the entreaty of the patron who had felt the want of his company so much as to forget all grievances. He was not now a humble student, Temple’s satellite and servant, but his friend and coadjutor, fully versed in all his secrets, and most likely already chosen as the guardian of his fame and the executor of his purposes and wishes; therefore it is not possible that Macaulay’s reckless picturesque description could apply to either time. Such an easy picture, however, has more effect upon the general imagination than the outcries of all the biographers, and the many researches made to show that Swift was not a sort of literary lackey, nor Stella an Abigail, but that he had learned to prize the advantages of his home there during his absence from it, and that during the latter part of his life at Moor Park at least his position was as good as that of a dependent can ever be. Sir William Temple died, as Swift records affectionately, on the morning of January 27, 1699, “and with him all that was good and amiable among men.” He died, however, leaving the young man who had spent so many years of his life under his wing, scarcely better for that long subjection. Swift had a legacy of £100 for his trouble in editing his patron’s memoirs, and he got the profits of those memoirs, amounting, Mr. Forster calculates, to no less than £600--no inconsiderable present; but no one of the many appointments which were then open to the retainers of the great, and especially to a young man of letters, had come in Swift’s way. He himself, it is said, “still believed in the royal pledge for the first prebend that should fall vacant in Westminster or Canterbury,” but this was a hope which had accompanied him ever since he explained constitutional law to King William six years before, and could not be very lively after this long interval.