to the fair
sex. Ladies have never been able to decide satisfactorily why he did not
marry. It may have been that having lived in grand houses, he did not
think he had a competent income. In his thoughts on various subjects, he
says, "Matrimony has many children, Repentance, Discord, Poverty,
Jealousy, Sickness, Spleen, &c."

His sentimental and platonic friendship with young ladies, to whom he
gave poetical names, made them historical, but not happy. "Stella," to
whom he is supposed to have been privately married before her death,
charmed him with her loveliness and wit. Some of his prettiest pieces,
in which poetry is intermingled with humour, were written to her. In an
address to her in 1719, on her attaining thirty-five years of age, after
speaking of the affection travellers have for the old "Angel Inn," he
says--

"Now this is Stella's case in fact
An angel's face a little cracked,
(Could poets or could painters fix
How angels look at thirty-six)
This drew us in at first to find
In such a form an angel's mind;
And every virtue now supplies
The fainting rays of Stella's eyes
See at her levee crowding swains
Whom Stella greatly entertains
With breeding humour, wit, and sense
And puts them out to small expense,
Their mind so plentifully fills
And makes such reasonable bills,
So little gets, for what she gives
We really wonder how she lives,
And had her stock been less, no doubt,
She must have long ago run out."

Swift says that Stella "always said the best thing in the company," but
to judge by the specimens he has preserved, this must have been the
opinion of a lover, unless the society she moved in was extremely dull.
At the same time those who assert that her allusions were coarse, have
no good foundation for such a calumny. Her humour contrasted with that
of the Dean, both in its weakness and its delicacy. Swift was too fond
of bringing forward into the light what should be concealed, but saw the
fault in others, and imputed it to an absence of inventive power. He
writes--

"You do not treat nature wisely by always striving to get beneath the
surface. What to show and to conceal she knows, it is one of her
eternal laws to put her best furniture forward."

The last of his writings before his mind gave way was his "Directions to
Servants." It was compiled apparently from jottings set down in hours of
idleness, and shows that his love of humour survived as long as an