Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 1.djvu/309

Rh more likely to excite curiosity than any other. We know there were two ladies, represented by him as the most accomplished of their sex, adorned with all the charms and graces, both of person and mind, that might penetrate the most obdurate breast, whose hearts were wholly devoted to him. We know too that he had a just sense of their value, that he lived on terms of the closest friendship with both, but it does not appear that he ever made a suitable return of love to either.

As his conduct toward these two celebrated ladies, Stella and Vanessa, seems to be wrapped up in the darkest shades of any part of his history, and has given rise to various conjectures, which yet have produced no satisfactory solution of the doubts which it has occasioned; I shall endeavour, by collecting some scattered rays from different parts of his Works, and adding other lights which have come to my knowledge, to disperse the mysterious gloom with which this subject seems to have been enveloped, and put the whole in a clear point of view. In order to this, it will be necessary, in the first place, to form a judgment how Swift stood affected toward the female sex, either from constitution, or reflection. With regard to the former, he seems to have been of a very cold habit, and little spurred on by any impulse of desire: and as to the latter, he appears in the early part of his life to have had little inclination to enter into the married state, and afterward to have had a fixed dislike to it.

His sentiments on this head are fully displayed in the following letter to a kinsman of his, written in the 24th year of his age: Rh