The Dean’s last recorded journey was made in September 1727. The little memorandum-book, tattered and discoloured, in which he noted down many of its incidents is still in existence, and is not only a valuable document in the story of Swift’s life, but is equally precious and interesting as an intimate record of the daily trials and troubles of a traveller in those times, set down while he was still on his journey and thus echoing every passing feeling. Swift was in bad health and worse spirits when he wrote this diary at Holyhead, where he was detained for seven days by contrary winds. It was written for lack of employment afforded to a cultivated mind in the dreary little seaport, and under the influence of a great sorrow. “Stella” lay dying over in Ireland, and he, raging with impatience at Holyhead, filled his notebook with aimless scribbling. “All this to divert thinking,” he writes, sadly, in the midst of it. The original notebook is still in existence, and is carefully preserved at the South Kensington Museum, to which it was bequeathed by John Forster. Inside its cover the handwriting of successive owners gives the relic an authentic pedigree, and Swift himself humorously declares how he came into possession of the blank book: “This book I stole from the Right Honourable George Dodington, Esq., one of the Lords of the Treasury, but the scribblings are all my own.” This George Dodington was George Bubb Dodington, afterwards Lord Melcombe. On the first page are hastily-scribbled memoranda for appointments: “In Fleet Street, about a clerk of St. Patrick’s Cathedral”; “Spectacles for seventy years old”; “Godfrey in Southampton Street”; “Hungary waters and palsy drops.” Then the Dean left London, riding horseback, with his servant, Watt, for company on another nag, and carrying his master’s travelling valise. The heavy luggage had been sent on by waggon to Chester. Watt, as we shall presently see, was a veritable Handy Andy, always doing the wrong thing, or the right thing in a wrong way. Swift carried the notebook in his pocket, without writing anything of his journey in it until Holyhead was reached. A few unfinished lines on an old cassock, out at elbows, preface the diary, which begins abruptly: “Friday at 11 in the morning I left Chester. It was Sept. 22, 1727. I baited at a blind ale house 7 miles from Chester. I thence rode to Ridland (Rhuddlan), in all 22 miles. I lay there: bred, bed, meat and tolerable wine. I left Ridland a quarter after 4 morn on Saturday, slept, on Penmanmaur (Penmaenmawr), examined about my sign verses the Inn is to be on t’other side, therefore the verses to be changed.”[A] [A] See p. 21.