and hearing she was rich, made up to her, gained
her affections (as they call it), and proposed to marry her. She
agreed, provided her mother did. They came to Rome. Swift
followed, established himself at the same inn, and wrote to the
mother to propose himself. The mother declined. He wrote a second
letter--same reply. He then prevailed on the girl to promise not
to give him up, but failed in persuading her to elope with him.
She said she would marry him when she was of age. He pressed her
to give him a written promise to this effect before witnesses.
After some hesitation she agreed, and one evening (having been
previously appointed by him) she met him in another room, where
she found a priest and two men. She signed two papers without
reading them, heard a short form muttered over, which she did not
understand, and then was told to run downstairs again. A few days
after she got uneasy as to what had happened, and confessed it
all to her mother, who immediately conceived that this was a
marriage ceremony into which she had been inveigled. She told her
lover what she had done, who asked her what her mother had said.
She told him that her mother fancied that it was a marriage, but
that she had told her it was not, when he informed her it was,
and this was the first intimation he gave her of the sort, and
the first time he had given her to understand that he regarded
her as his wife. She reproached him with his duplicity and the
imposition he had practised on her, and told him she would have
no more to say to him. This took place in St. Peter's one Friday
at vespers. Soon after they went to Naples, where Swift followed,
and wrote to her mother saying he had married her daughter, and
asking her forgiveness; that she might fancy the marriage was not
valid, but she would find it was, having been celebrated by an
abbe, witnessed by the nephew of a cardinal, and the certificate
signed by a cardinal, with the knowledge of the Pope. She sent no
answer, when he begged an interview, which she granted, and then
he told her that he was a Catholic, and that her daughter had
become so too, and had signed an act of abjuration of the
Protestant religion. The mother and daughter, however, declined
having anything to do with him, and the latter declared that she
had never changed her religion at all. He then claimed her as his
wife, and tried to prevail on Hill and Lushington (Sir Henry
Lushington, Consul--the present Lord Berwick, Mini