tions of correspondence which signally reveal character,-informal diaries before whose "glass" the letter-writer truly "dresses his own soul. Did space permit, we might have mounted higher. For all annalists and essayists are born diarists or the reverse. Herodotus is a diarist by nature; so, if less primitively, is Tacitus; so eminently are Froissart and Burnet; so, after his manner, is Macaulay. Not so are Thucydides or Clarendon or Gibbon. Montaigne is a diarist; Bacon, the opposite. It is a difference of temperaments-the difference between the authors of the 'Spectator' and the author of the 'Rambler,' between Goldsmith and Smollett, Sterne and Fielding. Rousseau is a diarist even in his so-called 'Philosophy'; Voltaire, a "Philosopher" even in his 'Notes sur les Anglois.'

If ever a man was designed to keep a diary, it was Pepys. He is naïve and communicative to a fault. Seated in his own confessional, he unbosoms his memory and absolves his conscience. The journal was composed in cipher. Mrs Pepys could have made nothing of it; it was never apparently meant for perusal. This typical bourgeois of his day, fussy and pompous, petty and busybodying, regular in his irregularities as in his expenditure, thrifty, vain, and passionately inquisitive, would retire into his sanctum, produce the treasured pages, and find his relief in the truthful industry of his chronicle. For truth and industry

ures. "With my eyes mighty weary and my head full of care how to get my accounts and business settled against my journey, home to supper and bed," he writes in the face of his infirmity. So is fortitude. There is a genuine pathos in the words which close the diary when blindness was threatening the little Secretary to the Admiralty with its terrors. From henceforth he "must be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know; or if there be anything, I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, to add here and there a note in shorthand with my own hand. And so I betake myself to that course which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave: for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!" Sturdy, stoical-nay, in a sense piouspetit maître, for all his foibles and frailties! His periodical headache of repentance is followed by the periodical draught of peccadillo. Though he has no deep sense of life's mystery, he does realise his accountability to God-a prosaic accountability like those official audits that so taxed his diligence. never whimpers or makes excuse. Nor does he brave it out, like that German colonel whom Königsmarck suborned to stab Mr Thynne, and who averred, as he marched to execution, that he did not care for death a rush, and that he hoped "God would treat him like a gentleman." No, Pepys only regrets

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and things at home and abroad; but it is photographic, it lacks distinction and temperament. Evelyn himself may be well portrayed by his own account of his younger brother, "A sober, prudent, worthy gentleman. A country magnate who survived terrible crises, travelled much when travel was a rarity, he always preserved an open heart and an open mind as well as an open house. He maps out rather than paints his stormy, stirring periods. His own individuality does not modify or tinge his theme. One phase of his, however, we feel constrained to rescue: "This day I paid all my debts to a farthing, O blessed day!"

Some seven years only divide the close of his almanac and the threshold of 'The Journal to Stella,' but the gulf between them in attraction is immeasurable. Swift's diary of two worlds - his own and hers whose letters have unfortunately perished-stands out unique, the most entrancing and the most tragic of all extant journals. It haunts one like a refrain. The mere step in style from the quaint affectations of Pepys and the colourless gravity of Evelyn to Swift's nervous diction, his terse impetuosity, his repressed fondness, his emphasised hardness, his little pathetic language, his large indignant irony, is the step from still life to breathing, from lecture to literature, from what must always remain ancient to what will never cease to be modern. Yet we owe its preservation to a double accident. Had the Irish bishops never

despatched his Reverence of Laracor to obtain remission of the First Fruits, had Swift never penned his history of the Last Four Years of Queen Anne, for which purpose he reclaimed the Journal, we should have lost at once the miniatures and the picture—the miniatures of his own soul and Stella's, the picture of those two turbid years and nine months, the quintessence of its trifles alike and its tremendous issues, its cabals, its inner and outer life, all rendered with a faithfulness born of yearning and a force native to that selftorturing genius. He shuts the door of his London, Chelsea, or Kensington lodging after his restless day of dictatorial business; he dismisses the drunken Patrick. At once, as by enchantment, the willows, the canal, the cherry-trees, above all, the two ladies of Laracor, arise before him. He listens to them; he answers them with abrupt ejaculations, with soft whispers; he invests their merest bagatelles with actuality and importance, just as long afterwards in his "Gulliver." We are as deeply concerned to know if that box reached Stella as we are to learn the last disclosure of the wonderful Mr St John which the masterful Presto imparts to his "State-girls.' He will assert himself even here and outdo them; he will write "five for two" of theirs; he dashes it all off uncorrected at redhot speed. He "cannot put out the candle till he has bid them good-night." He "must always be in conversation with M. D., and M. D. with Presto."

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"As hope saved, nothing gives Presto any dream of happiness but a letter now and then from his dearest M. D." "Yes, faith and when I write to M. D. I am happy too; it is just as if methinks you were here and I prating to you and telling you where I have been. "Well,' says you, 'Presto come, where have you been to-day? Come let's hear now.' And so then I answer.' He peeps over their hand at cards; he toasts them both at coxcomb Jemmy Leigh's." Is Stella jealous of his present to Dingley? Dingley is buxom and healthy, and must care for Stella. He takes a fancy to Lady Ashburnham because she resembles Stella. Of Stella he dreams over and over again. "God Almighty bless her for her kindness to poor Presto: a merry Christmas and a happy New Year; and pray God we may never keep them asunder again." "God Almighty bless poor dear Stella and send her a great many birthdays, all happy and healthy, wealthy and with me ever together.' "When I find you are happy and merry there, it makes me so here, and I can hardly imagine you absent when I am reading your letter or writing to you. No, faith you are just here upon this little paper, and therefore I see and talk with you every evening constantly." "M. D.'s felicity is the great end I aim at in all my pursuits." He supervises her exercise, her spelling, her books. He is anxious about her eyes and her horse. He will become a china-maniac for her sake. Has she received the

palsy water her mother left for her yet? Presto in one brief fortnight shoots up into a great man on whom Harley and St John and the Tory wits have fastened; ay, and he has fastened them too! But, "Believe me, no man breathing at present has less share of happiness in life than I. I do not say I am unhappy at all, but that everything here is tasteless to me for want of being where I would be. And so a short sigh and no more of this." "Yet the day came when he returned as Dean to the place where he would be' without exultation, and with a long pang far more piteous than this short sigh." "Miss Hessy" had already in that first year entered on the scene. We have taken the trouble to count how many times Presto dined at Mrs Vanhomrigh's till the beginning of 1712. There are over fifty occasions of those five o'clock dinners, usually with an avowed and uneasy excuse. It was so rainy; he had hurt his shin and must eat at a neighbour's; he only dined "gravely" with the extravagant widow and her smart set.

But afterwards the pretexts end and the dinners are unconfessed. During the initial period his very excuses plead for Swift. His association with the susceptible Vanessa resembled Goethe's with Bettina; and the pupil would, like Bettina, have receded, a childlike episode, had not Vanessa proved of another mould. The clue, on the other hand, to Swift's association with Stella is the analogy of Goethe's with Mina

of passion with duty, of platonic friendship with stifling prudence, that is mirrored in "Die Wahlverwandschaften distracts and distorts the lacerated being of Swift. His character was not unlike his own portrait of the ill-starred Duchess of Hamilton, who "seldom spared anybody that gave her the least provocation, by which she had many enemies and few friends." To these few he clung violently and intensely. Does any one doubt Swift's unfeigned and radical tenderness of heart? Let him read in these pages of his kindness to Mrs Long, the poor bankrupt beauty; of his dutiful attendance on the old, bedridden Mrs Wesley; of his fatherly goodness to young Harrison; of his devotion to Harley, Peterborough, Atterbury, Lewis, Arbuthnot; of his eager offices for his political enemies Addison, Steele, Phillips, and Rowe; of his methodical almsgiving; of his resolve "in honour and conscience to use all my little credit towards helping forward men of worth in the world." That resolve hindered his own advancement; it helped Pope, Gay, and Diaper; it made Parnell and Bishop Berkeley. He was no sentimentalist, but under the fountain of bitterness welled something sweet and delicious. Beneath that savage ambition throbbed poet's heart. Thackeray, unjust to Swift and over-generous to Addison, never excerpted that passage about the linnet: "I went last night to put

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Patrick was gone to bed; and there I saw in a closet a poor linnet he has bought to bring over to Dingley: it cost him sixpence, and is as tame as a dormouse. I believe he does not know he is a bird. Where you put him there he stands, and seems to have neither hope nor fear." Nor does he relate how Swift turned aside that the proud, heartbroken Duke of Ormond might wipe the tears for his daughter from his eyes. Nor the following about the Duchess of Hamilton after her husband's fatal duel with Lord Mohun: "I have been with her two hours and am just come away. I never saw so melancholy a scene; for indeed all reasons for real grief belong to her; nor is it possible for anybody to be a greater loser in all regards. She has moved my very soul." Nor how he played with Lady Masham's children. Yet this extraordinary man is, like Hamlet, "very proud, revengeful, ambitious." For those who affront himself, the Church, or his friends, he will have no mercy. Like Tarquin, he knocks off the tallest heads with his implacable stick. When Lady Masham's attendance at Court was imperative for the Cause, he blames her for sitting by the sick-bedside of the very child with whom he had romped. This is how he mentions his only sister, who had long before displeased him by her marriage: "Mrs Fenton writes to me as one dying, and desires I would think of her son; I have not

answered her letter." When Swift was very ill, and that same sister called to see him, he denied her admittance, but nevertheless he stinted himself to make her an allowance.

The severe illness of Swift is the dividing line of the Journal. Before it, all is high hope, excited elasticity, intermeddling triumph, and confiding affection. After it, comes a listless and saturnine depression." It was not all Miss Hessy. The great men who court him put him off. He is weary of disregarded counsel and society's school for scandal. Now and again the old burst of love and loyalty struggles through the gloom. But gradually the stern melancholy settles on him. He neglects Stella's birthday congratulations; he becomes more and more suspicious and reticent. And what a world is that which he subdues! The prodigy Bolingbroke manoeuvring and misunderstood. Intrepid Oxford loitering through crisis to catastrophe. The dilatory Queen, emancipated from Whig tutelage, but under the thumb of orthodox Archbishop of York and homely Mrs Masham "extremely like one Mrs Malolly that was once my landlady in Trim"; under the sinister thumbscrew, further, of the haughty Duchess of Somerset, who will not be shaken off. Manipulating Prior's "lean carcase." Accomplished, prim, spotless Addison condescending to tope with his unroystering circle of obsequious Bohemians, and "fair sexing" it in the 'Spectator. Even after their

cleavage Swift would fain be friends, and gets him to dine with Mrs Secretary St John. Discarded Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, vowing vengeance and clutching gold. Witty, versatile Lady Orkney. Pert, flirting Lady Betty Germaine. Sweet, weeping Mrs St John. Swaggering, raking Sir Andrew Fountaine. Rich, stingy Sir Thomas Mansel. Sanguine, stock-jobbing Stratford. The gallants strut and chatter in the Mall. The newsmongering busybodies flit from coffee - house to coffee-house. The very footmen hold their own Parliament outside Westminster Hall and elect their Speaker. Calmly in the background sit Somers, Halifax, and Walpole, concocting their revenge and awaiting their success. Guiscard stabs Harley, and ensures Oxford's popularity. The magnifico - Ambassador Monteleon scrapes and bows to the great Doctor Swift. Prince Eugene comes in to trouble the land. The

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expensive Duc D'Aumont hurries over from France, and has his ambassadorial house burned over him. It is a Whig plot. So is the disturbance on Queen Elizabeth's birthday. The town takes its cue from the men of letters. Everybody is inventing conspiracies or unearthing them. Spying Abbés Gautier and Dubois confabulate at Windsor over the treaty of Utrecht with its formulating genius. A bishop goes to preside over the congress that is to kill the war. Oxford and Bolingbroke refuse mutual quarter. The Government are "driv