taken over to reside with him, or close to his neighbourhood, in Ireland, a certain young and beautiful girl, named Hester Johnson, with whom he had formed an acquaintance in Sir William Temple's house, where she had been brought up, and where, though she passed as a daughter of Sir William's steward, she was believed to be, in reality, a natural daughter of Sir William himself. They would have found that his relations to this girl, whom he had himself educated from her childhood at Sheen and Moorpark, were of a very singular and puzzling kind; that on the one hand she was devotedly attached to him, and on the other he cherished a passionate affection for her, wrote and spoke of her as his "Stella," and liked always to have her near him; yet that a marriage between them seemed not to be thought of by either; and that, in order to have her near him without giving rise to scandal, he had taken the precaution to bring over an elderly maiden lady, called Mrs. Dingley, to reside with her as a companion, and was most careful to be in her society only when this Mrs. Dingley was present. There was mystery and romance enough, therefore, about the wild, black-browed Irish parson, who attracted the regards of the wits in Button's coffee-house. What had brought him there? That was partly a mystery too; but the mystery would have been pretty well solved if it had been known that, uncouth-looking clerical lout as he was, he was an author like the rest of them, having just written a political pamphlet which was making or was to make a good deal of noise in the world, and having at that moment in his pocket at least one other piece which he was about to publish. The political pamphlet was an _Essay on the Civil Discords in Athens and Rome_, having an obvious bearing on certain dissensions then threatening to break up the Whig party in Great Britain. It was received as a vigorous piece of writing on the ministerial side, and was ascribed by some to Lord Somers, and by others to Burnet. Swift had come over to claim it, and to see what it and his former connexion with Temple could do for him among the leading Whigs. For the truth was, an ambition equal to his consciousness of power gnawed at the heart of this furious and gifted man, whom a perverse fate had flung away into an obscure vicarage on the wrong side of the channel. His books, his garden, his canal with its willows at Laracor; his dearly-beloved Roger Coxe, and the other perplexed and admiring parishioners of Laracor over whom he domineered; his clerical colleagues in the neighbourhood; and even the society of Stella, the wittiest and best of her sex, whom he loved better than any other creature on earth: all these were insufficient to occupy the craving void in his mind. He hated Ireland, and regarded his lot there as one of banishment; he longed to be in London, and struggling in the centre of whatever was going on. About the date of his appointment to the living of Laracor he