and she pressed Swift for advice in the management of her affairs. When she
suggested coming to Ireland, where she had property, he told her that if she
took this step he would "see her very seldom." However, she took up her abode
at Celbridge, only a few miles from Dublin. Swift gave her many cautions, out
of "the perfect esteem and friendship" he felt for her, but he often visited
her. She was dissatisfied, however, begging him to speak kindly, and at least
to counterfeit his former indulgent friendship. "What can be wrong," she
wrote, "in seeing and advising an unhappy young woman? You cannot but know
that your frowns make my life unsupportable." Sometimes he treated the matter
lightly; sometimes he showed annoyance; sometimes he assured her of his esteem
and love, but urged her not to make herself or him "unhappy by imaginations."
He was uniformly unsuccessful in stopping Vanessa's importunity. He
endeavoured, she said, by severities to force her from him; she knew she was
the cause of uneasy reflections to him; but nothing would lessen her
"inexpressible passion."

Unfortunately he failed--partly no doubt from mistaken considerations of
kindness, partly because he shrank from losing her affection--to take
effective steps to put an end to Vanessa's hopes. It would have been better
if he had unhesitatingly made it clear to her that he could not return her
passion, and that if she could not be satisfied with friendship the intimacy
must cease. To quote Sir Henry Craik, "The friendship had begun in literary
guidance: it was strengthened by flattery: it lived on a cold and almost
stern repression, fed by confidences as to literary schemes, and by occasional
literary compliments: but it never came to have a real hold over Swift's
heart."

With 1716 we come to the alleged marriage with Stella. In 1752, seven years
after Swift's death, Lord Orrery, in his Remarks on Swift, said that Stella
was "the concealed, but undoubted, wife of Dr. Swift. . . . If my