Page:The English humourists of the eighteenth century. A series of lectures, delivered in England, Scotland, and the United States of America (IA englishhumourist00thacrich).pdf/65

 women, we shall find that he looked upon them rather as busts than as whole figures."—. "You must have smiled to have found his house a constant seraglio of very virtuous women, who attended him from morning to night."—. A correspondent of Sir Walter Scott's furnished him with the materials on which to found the following interesting passage about Vanessa—after she had retired to cherish her passion in retreat:— "Marley Abbey, near Celbridge, where Miss Vanhomrigh resided, is built much in the form of a real cloister, especially in its external appearance. An aged man (upwards of ninety, by his own account) showed the grounds to my correspondent. He was the son of Mrs. Vanhomrigh's gardener, and used to work with his father in the garden while a boy. He remembered the unfortunate Vanessa well; and his account of her corresponded with the usual description of her person, especially as to her embonpoint. He said she went seldom abroad, and saw little company: her constant amusement was reading, or walking in the garden She avoided company, and was always melancholy, save when Dean Swift was there, and then she seemed happy. The garden was to an uncommon degree crowded with laurels. The old man said that when Miss Vanhomrigh expected the Dean she always planted with her own hand a laurel or two against his arrival. He showed her favourite seat, still called 'Vanessa's bower.' Three or four trees and some laurels indicate the spot There were two seats and a rude table within the bower, the opening of which commanded a view of the Liffey In this sequestered spot, according to the old gardener's account, the Dean and Vanessa used often to sit, with books and writing materials on the table before them."— Swift, vol. i. pp. 246-7. "But Miss Vanhomrigh, irritated at the situation in which she found herself, determined on bringing to a crisis those expectations of a union with the object of her affections—to the hope of which she had clung amid every vicissitude of his conduct towards her. The most probable bar was his undefined connection with Mrs. Johnson, which, as it must have been perfectly known to her, had, doubtless, long elicited her secret jealousy, although only a single And when she died, and Stella heard that Swift had written beautifully regarding her, "that doesn't