Stella herself confirmed the fatal truth by a candid avowal and Miss Vanhomrigh sank under the shock. For eight years, trusting probably to the promises of Swift, and the apparently failing health of Stella, she had maintained the unequal contest with her deep-rooted passion and Swift's mysterious conduct, but this revelation of his villainy was her death. However, she lived only to revoke in haste her will, which had been made in favor of Swift, and to leave her fortune to Mr. Marshall, afterward one of the judges of the Court of Common Pleas in Ireland, and Dr. Berkeley, the celebrated philosopher, and afterward Bishop of Cloyne; and to command the publication of all the letters which had passed between Swift and herself, as well as the celebrated poem of Cadenus and Vanessa. Stella died in 1727-8, having borne the secret and corroding suffering of the position imposed by the selfishness of Swift for upward of thirty years. Mrs. Whiteway, a lady who was on terms of great intimacy with Swift, and spent much time at the deanery of St. Patrick's, stated, that when Stella was on her death-bed, she expostulated with Swift on his having kept their marriage unnecessarily secret, and expressed her fear that it might leave a stain on her reputation, to which Swift replied, "Well, my dear, if you wish it, it shall be owned." Stella replied, "_It is too late!_" Scott says "he received this report of Mrs. Whiteway with pleasure, as vindicating the dean from the charge of cold-blooded and hard-hearted cruelty to the unfortunate Stella, when on the verge of existence." How does it vindicate him from any such charge? The avowal was never made by him; and so dubious was the very fact of the marriage left, as far as any act of Swift's was concerned, that its very existence has since been strenuously denied, especially by Mr. Monck Mason in his History of St. Patrick's Cathedral. The simple truth is, that the whole of Swift's conduct to Stella for thirty-three years was a piece of "cold-blooded and hard-hearted cruelty," which admits of no defense. Such was the treatment which all ladies who manifested an attachment to Swift received at his hands; is it any wonder that such a man went mad?