[102] See the lines on Lady Hyde's picture in Granville's poems. [103] Lady Jane Hyde married the Earl of Essex. [104] On the death of Gay, Swift had addressed to the Duchess a letter of condolence in his usual cynical style. The Duchess replied with feeling--"I differ from you, that it is possible to comfort one's self for the loss of friends, as one does for the loss of money. I think I could live on very little, nor think myself poor, nor be thought so; but a _little_ friendship could never satisfy one. In almost every thing but friends, another of the same name may do as well; but _friend_ is more than a name, _if_ it be any thing."--This is true; but, as Touchstone says--"much virtue in _if_!" [105] Charlotte, Countess of Newburgh in her own right, from whom the present Earl of Newburgh is descended. [106] Spence's Anecdotes. CHAPTER XIV. STELLA AND VANESSA. It is difficult to consider Swift as a poet. So many unamiable, disagreeable, unpoetical ideas are connected with his name, that, great as he was in fame and intellectual vigour, he seems as misplaced in the temple of the muses as one of his own yahoos. But who has not heard of "Swift's Stella?" and of Cadenus and Vanessa? Though all will confess that the two devoted women, who fell victims to his barbarous selfishness, and whose names are eternally linked with the history of our literature, are far more interesting, from their ill-bestowed, ill-requited and passionate attachment to _him_, than by any thing he ever sung or said of _them_.[107] Nay, his longest, his most elaborate, and his most admired poem--the avowed history of one of his attachments--with its insipid tawdry fable, its conclusion, in which nothing is concluded, and the inferences we are left to draw from it, would have given but an ignominious celebrity to poor Vanessa, if truth and time, and her own sweet nature, had not redeemed her. I pass over Swift's early attachment to Jane Waryng, whom he deserted after a seven years' engagement: she is not in any way connected with his literary history,--and what became of her afterwards is not known. He excused himself by some pitiful subterfuges about fortune; but it appears, from a comparison of dates, that the occasion of his breaking off with her, was his rising partiality for another. When Swift was an inmate of Sir William Temple's family at Moor Park, he met with Esther Johnson, who appears to have been a kind of humble companion to Sir William's niece, Miss Gifford. She is said by some to have been the daughter of Sir William's steward; by others we are told that her father was a London merchant, who had failed in business. This was the interesting and ill-fated woman, since renowned as "Swift's Stella."