regard and
esteem, but he "ne'er admitted love a guest," and he had been so long
used to this Platonic affection, that he had come to regard women as
friends, but never as lovers. Stella, on her part, had the same feeling,
for she never expressed the least discontent at her position, or ever
regarded Swift otherwise than as her tutor, her counsellor, her friend.
In her verses to him on his birthday, 1721, she says:

Long be the day that gave you birth
Sacred to friendship, wit, and mirth;
Late dying may you cast a shred
Of your rich mantle o'er my head;
To bear with dignity my sorrow
One day alone, then die tomorrow.

Stella naturally expected to survive Swift, but it was not to be. She
died in the evening of the 28th January 1727-8; and on the same night he
began the affecting piece, "On the Death of Mrs. Johnson." (See "Prose
Works," vol. xi.)

With the death of Stella, Swift's real happiness ended, and he became
more and more possessed by the melancholy which too often accompanies the
broadest humour, and which, in his case, was constitutional. It was, no
doubt, to relieve it, that he resorted to the composition of the doggerel
verses, epigrams, riddles, and trifles exchanged betwixt himself and
Sheridan, which induced Orrery's remark that "Swift composing Riddles is
Titian painting draught-boards;" on which Delany observes that "a Riddle
may be as fine painting as any other in the world. It requires as strong
an imagination, as fine colouring, and as exact a proportion and keeping
as any other historical painting"; and he instances "Pethox the Great,"
and should also have alluded to the more learned example--"Louisa to
Strephon."

On Orrery's seventh Letter, Delany says that if some of the "coin is
base," it is the fine impression and polish which adds value to it, and
cites the saying of another nobleman, that "there is indeed some stuff
in it, but it is Swift's stuff." It has been said that Swift has never
taken a thought from any writer ancient or modern. This is not literally
true, but the instances are not many, and in my notes I have pointed out
the lines snatched from Milton, Denham, Butler--the last evidently a
great favourite.

It seems necessary to state shortly the causes of Swift not having
obtained higher preferment. Besides that Queen Anne would never be
reconciled to the author of the "Tale of a Tub"--the true purport of
which was so ill-understood by her--he made an irreconcilable enemy of