ch they received from him. Again,
when on a visit at Sir Arthur Acheson's, he insisted upon making Lady
Acheson read such books as he thought fit to advise, and in the doggerel
verses entitled "My Lady's Lamentation," she is supposed to resent his
"very imperious" manner of instruction:

No book for delight
Must come in my sight;
But instead of new plays,
Dull Bacon's Essays,
And pore every day on
That nasty Pantheon.

As a contrast to his imperiousness, there is an affectionate simplicity
in the fancy names he used to bestow upon his female friends. Sir William
Temple's wife, Dorothea, became Dorinda; Esther Johnson, Stella; Hester
Vanhomrigh, Vanessa; Lady Winchelsea, Ardelia; while to Lady Acheson he
gave the nicknames of Skinnybonia, Snipe, and Lean. But all was taken by
them in good part; for his rather dictatorial ways were softened by the
fascinating geniality and humour which he knew so well how to employ when
he used to "deafen them with puns and rhyme."

Into the vexed question of the relations between Swift and Stella I do
not purpose to enter further than to record my conviction that she was
never more to him than "the dearest friend that ever man had." The
suggestion of a concealed marriage is so inconsistent with their whole
conduct to each other from first to last, that if there had been such a
marriage, instead of Swift having been, as he was, a man of _intense
sincerity_, he must be held to have been a most consummate hypocrite.
In my opinion, Churton Collins settled this question in his essays on
Swift, first published in the "Quarterly Review," 1881 and 1882. Swift's
relation with Vanessa is the saddest episode in his life. The story is
amply told in his poem, "Cadenus and Vanessa," and in the letters which
passed between them: how the pupil became infatuated with her tutor; how
the tutor endeavoured to dispel her passion, but in vain, by reason; and
how, at last, she died from love for the man who was unable to give love
in return. That Swift ought, as soon as Hester disclosed her passion for
him, at once to have broken off the intimacy, must be conceded; but how
many men possessed of his kindness of heart would have had the courage to
have acted otherwise than he did? Swift seems, in fact, to have been
constitutionally incapable of the _passion_ of love, for he says,
himself, that he had never met the woman he wished to marry. His annual
tributes to Stella on her birthdays express the strongest