But this was not the light in which the headstrong young woman, who made no secret of her love, and filled him with “shame, disappointment, guilt, remorse,” by the revelation, regarded his attentions. Their correspondence went on for nearly ten years. It is a painful correspondence, as the outpouring of a woman’s passion for a man who does not respond to it must always be; but Swift never seems to have fostered that passion, nor to have done anything but discourage and subdue a love so embarrassing and troublesome. And now comes in the mystery which everybody has discussed, but which none have brought to any certain conclusion. In 1716, two years after Swift’s return to Ireland, it is said that he married Stella, thus putting himself at once out of all possibility of marrying Miss Vanhomrigh (which might have been a motive) and satisfying Stella, as the notion goes. Scott receives the statement as proved; so does Mr. Craik, Swift’s last, and a most conscientious and careful biographer. The evidence for it is that Lord Orrery and Dr. Delany, the earliest writers on the subject, both assert it (“if my informations are right,” as the former says) as a supposition universally believed in society; and that the fact was told by the Bishop of Clogher, who performed the ceremony, to Bishop Berkeley, who told it to his wife, who told it after her husband’s death, and long after the event, to George Monck Berkeley, who tells the story. But Bishop Berkeley was in Italy at the time and could not have been told, though he might have heard it at second-hand from his pupil, the Bishop of Clogher’s son. We wonder if an inheritance or the legitimacy of a child would be considered proved by such evidence, or whether the prevailing sense of society that such a thing ought to have taken place has not a large share in the common belief. At all times, as at the present moment, wherever a close friendship between man and woman exists (and the very fact of such rumors makes it extremely rare), suggestions of the same description float in the air. Nobody supposes, if the marriage took place at all, that it was anything more than a mere form. It was performed, if performed at all, in the garden without any formal or legal preliminaries. Supposing such a fictitious rite to have any justification in Irish law, we wonder what the authorities of the church would have had to say to two high dignitaries who united to perform an act so disorderly and contrary to ecclesiastical decorum, if to nothing else. It is totally unlike Swift, whose feeling for the church was strong, to have used her ordinances so disrespectfully, and most unlike all we know of Stella that she should have consented to so utterly false a relationship. However, the question is one which the reader will decide according to his own judgment, and upon which no one can speak with authority. Mr. Forster, of all Swift’s biographers the most elaborate and anxious, did not get so far in his