and relevance, but it is hoped that the reader will find all the information
that is necessary. Here and there a name has baffled research, but I have
been able to give definite particulars of a very large number of people--
noblemen and ladies in society in London or Dublin, Members of Parliament,
doctors, clergymen, Government officials, and others who have hitherto been
but names to the reader of the Journal. I have corrected a good many errors
in the older notes, but in dealing with so large a number of persons, some of
whom it is difficult to identify, I cannot hope that I myself have escaped
pitfalls.

G. A. A.



INTRODUCTION.

When Swift began to write the letters known as the Journal to Stella, he was
forty-two years of age, and Esther Johnson twenty-nine. Perhaps the most
useful introduction to the correspondence will be a brief setting forth of
what is known of their friendship from Stella's childhood, the more specially
as the question has been obscured by many assertions and theories resting on a
very slender basis of fact.

Jonathan Swift, born in 1667 after his father's death, was educated by his
uncle Godwin, and after a not very successful career at Trinity College,
Dublin, went to stay with his mother, Abigail Erick, at Leicester. Mrs. Swift
feared that her son would fall in love with a girl named Betty Jones, but, as
Swift told a friend, he had had experience enough "not to think of marriage
till I settle my fortune in the world, which I am sure will not be in some
years; and even then, I am so hard to please that I suppose I shall put it off