"Controversy," says the editor of the Swift-Vanessa letters,[1] "might have been more moderate in tone and more fruitful of result, if writers had always remembered that, though grounds of conjecture are abundant, the data for forming a judgment are manifestly incomplete." Leslie Stephen, a shrewd and cautious biographer, with a lawyer's gift for handling evidence, says "This is one of those cases in which we feel that even biographers are not omniscient; and I must leave it to my readers to choose their own theory, only suggesting that readers, too, are fallible." [1] Vanessa and Her Correspondence with Jonathan Swift. Letters edited for the first time from originals. With an introduction by A. Martin Freeman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. I propose an explanation of Swift, but propose it only as a conjecture, an hypothesis. I shall not even argue it up to the point of positive belief; certainly I shall not push it beyond the line where belief borders knowledge. Conjecture is good if it remains clearly in the realm of conjecture, an honest area of thought, and does not try to sneak over into the land of things proved. All of Swift's relations with women, and much else in his life, may be accounted for by the supposition that early he discovered or suspected that he was insane, that he believed his insanity might be transmissible, that he was consequently afraid to have children, that he was honest and strong enough to keep himself in check, that the resulting suppression made him irascible and bitter, that he was a vigorous and passionate man, that his quick shifts from tender fooling to savage satire, his friendly and brutal moods, his strutting arrogance that amazed the coffee houses, were not due to any tom-foolery of politics or thwarted ambition in the petty matter of advancement in the church but were due to a conflict, honorably won by Swift, in the place where a man lives. The "early" in this supposition is important. Leslie Stephen, quoting the familiar dark prophecy of Swift at the age of fifty: "I shall be like that tree; I shall die at the top," justly observes that "a man haunted perpetually by such forebodings might well think that marriage was not for him." But Stephen is dealing with Swift in middle age and offering an explanation of why, assuming that Swift was not already married to Stella, he did not marry Vanessa. Let us place the beginning of the perpetual foreboding early in Swift's life and see if the main facts, so far as we know them, will lie upon this supposition.