Stella naturally hoped, that when her rival was no more, and Swift no longer exposed to her torturing reproaches, that he would do her tardy justice, and at length acknowledge her as his wife. But no;-it would have cost him some little mortification and inconvenience; and on such a paltry pretext he suffered this amiable and admirable woman, of whom he had said, that "her merits towards him were greater than ever was in any human being towards another;" and "that she excelled in every good quality that could possibly accomplish a human creature,"-this woman did he suffer to languish into the grave, broken in heart and blighted in name. When Stella was on her death-bed, some conversation passed between them upon this sad subject. Only Swift's reply was audible: he said, "Well, my dear, it shall be acknowledged, if you wish it.” To which she answered with a sigh, "It is now too late !"* It was too late!—

Scott's Life of Swift.-Sheridan has recorded another interview between Stella and her destroyer, in which she

What now to her was womanhood or fame?

She died of a lingering decline, in January, 1728, four years after the death of Miss Vanhomrigh.

Thus perished these two innocent, warm-hearted and accomplished women;-so rich in all the graces of their sex-so formed to love and to be loved, to bless, and to be blessed,-sacrifices to the demoniac pride of the man they had loved and trusted. But it will be said, "si elles n'avaient point aimé, elles seraient moins connues:" they have become immortal by their connection with genius; they are celebrated, merely through their attachment to a celebrated man. But, good God! what an immortality! won by what martyrdom of the heart!—And what a celebrity! not that with which the poet's love, and his diviner verse, crown

besought him to acknowledge her before her death, that she might have the satisfaction of dying his wife; and he refused.

Dated Feb. 7, 1728, I find a letter from Swift to Martha

Blount, written in a style of gay badinage, and her answer; and in neither is there the slightest allusion to his recent loss.Roscoe's Pope, vol. viii. p. 460.

the deified object of his homage, but a celebrity, purchased with their life-blood and their tears! I quit the subject with a sense of relief:-yet

one word more.

It was after the death of these two amiable women, who had deserved so much from him, and whose enduring tenderness had flung round his odious life and character their only redeeming charm of sentiment and interest, that the native grossness and rancour of this incarnate spirit of libel burst forth with tenfold virulence.* He showed how true had been his love and his respect for them, by insulting and reviling, in terms a scavenger would disavow, the sex they belonged to. Swift's master-passion was pride,-an unconquerable, all-engrossing, self-revolving pride: he was proud of his vigorous intellect, proud of being the "dread and hate of half mankind,”—proud of his contempt for women,-proud of his tremendous

* It was after the death of Stella, that all Swift's coarsest satires were written. He was in the act of writing the last and

most terrible of these, when he was seized with insanity; and it remains unfinished.

powers of invective. It was his boast, that he never forgave an injury; it was his boast, that the ferocious and unsparing personal satire with which he avenged himself on those who offended him, had never been softened by the repentance, or averted by the concessions of the offender. Look at him in his last years, when the cold earth was heaped over those who would have cheered and soothed his dark and stormy spirit; without a friend-deprived of the mighty powers he had abused—alternately a drivelling idiot and a furious maniac, and sinking from both into a helpless, hopeless, prostrate lethargy of body and mind!-Draw,-draw the curtain, in reverence to the human ruin, lest our woman's hearts be tempted to unwomanly exultation!

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CHAPTER XV.

POPE AND MARTHA BLOUNT.

IF the soul of sensibility, which I believe Pope really possessed, had been enclosed in a healthful frame and an agreeable person, we might have reckoned him among our preux chevaliers, and have had sonnets instead of satires. But he seems to have been ever divided between two contending feelings. He was peculiarly sensible to the charms of women, and his habits as a valetudinarian, rendered their society and attention not only soothing and delightful, but absolutely necessary to him: while, unhappily, there mingled with this real love for them, and de