e numerous beautiful influences
that should make for Christian civilisation in America. Even the gift of
the best deanery in England failed to divert him from thoughts of this
Utopia. "Derry," he wrote, "is said to be worth L1,500 per annum, but I
do not consider it with a view to enriching myself. I shall be
perfectly contented if it facilitates and recommends my scheme of
Bermuda."

But the thing which finally made it possible for Berkeley to come to
America, the incident which is responsible for Whitehall's existence
to-day in a grassy valley to the south of Honeyman's Hill, two miles
back from the "second beach," at Newport, was the tragic ending of as
sad and as romantic a story as is to be found anywhere in the literary
life of England.

Swift, as has been said, was one of the friends who was of great service
to Berkeley when he went up to London for the first time. The witty and
impecunious dean had then been living in London for more than four
years, in his "lodging in Berry Street," absorbed in the political
intrigue of the last years of Queen Anne, and sending to Stella, in
Dublin, the daily journal, which so faithfully preserves the incidents
of those years. Under date of an April Sunday in 1713, we find in this
journal these lines, Swift's first mention of our present hero: "I went
to court to-day on purpose to present Mr. Berkeley, one of our fellows
at Trinity College. That Mr. Berkeley is a very ingenious man, and a
great philosopher, and I have mentioned him to all the ministers, and
have given them some of his writings, and I will favour him as much as I
can."

In the natural course of things Berkeley soon heard much, though he saw
scarcely anything, of Mrs. Vanhomrigh and her daughter, the latter the
famous and unhappy "Vanessa," both of whom were settled at this time in
Berry Street, near Swift, in a house where, Swift writes to Stella, "I
loitered hot and lazy after my morning's work," and often dined "out of
mere listlessness," keeping there "my best gown and perriwig" when at
Chelsea.

Mrs. Vanhomrigh was the widow of a Dutch merchant, who had followed
William the Third to Ireland, and there obtained places of profit, and
her daughter, Esther, or Hester, as she is variously called, was a girl
of eighteen when she first met Swift, and fell violently in love with
him. This passion eventually proved the girl's perdition,--and was, as
we shall see, the cause of a will which enabled Dean Berkeley t