work as to examine the evidence, yet intimates his disbelief of the story. We do not need, however, to have recourse to the expedient of a marriage to explain how the story of Vanessa might have been a pain and offense to Stella. Swift had not in this particular been frank with his friends, and the discovery, so near them, of a woman making so passionate a claim upon his affections must have conveyed the shock at once of a deception and an unpardonable intrusion to one who was proudly conscious of being his most trusted confidant and closest companion. Whatever were the rights of the case, however, nobody can now know. Whether Vanessa had heard the rumor of the private marriage, whether she conceived that a desperate appeal to his dearest friend might help her own claim, or whether mere suspicion and misery, boiling over, found expression in the hasty letter to Stella which she wrote at the crisis of her career, is equally unessential. She did write, and Stella, surprised and offended, showed the letter to Swift. Nothing can be more tragic than the events that follow. Swift, in one of those wild bursts of passion which were beyond the control of reason, rode out at once to the unfortunate young woman’s house. He burst in without a word, threw her own letter on the table before her, and rode off again like a whirlwind. Vanessa came of a short-lived race, and was then, at thirty-four, the last of her family. She never recovered the blow, but, dying soon after, directed her letters and the poem which contained the story of her love and his coldness to be published. This was not done for nearly a century; and now more than half of another has gone, but the story is as full of passion and misery, as unexplained, as ever. This was one of the occupations of Swift’s stagnant time. He fled, as he had done at the moment of Harley’s fall, that, at least, he might not see what was going to happen. But a little while longer was the other, the love of his life, spared to him. Five years after the tragical end of Vanessa, Stella too died, after long suffering. There is a second story, of equally doubtful authenticity and confused and extraordinary details, about a proposed tardy acknowledgment of the apocryphal marriage; but whether it was he or she who suggested this, whether it was he or she who found it “too late,” whether there was any reality in it at all, no one has ever determined. Stella’s illness grew serious while Swift [Illustration: GEORGE, EARL OF BERKELEY. FROM AN UNFINISHED ENGRAVING, IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM, ATTRIBUTED TO DAVID LOGGAN.]