Berkeley, and she from her husband, who had it from Dr. Ashe, by whom they were married.  These are at least unimpeachable witnesses.  The date of the marriage is more doubtful, but Sheridan is probably not far wrong when he puts it in 1716.  It was simply a reparation, and no union was implied in it.  Delany intimates that Vanessa, like the young Chevalier, vulgarized her romance in drink.  More than this, however, was needful to palliate even in Swift the brutal allusion to her importunacy in “Gulliver,” unless, as is but too possible, the passage in question be an outbreak of ferocious spleen against her victorious rival.  Its coarseness need not make this seem impossible, for that was by no means a queasy age, and Swift continued on intimate terms with Lady Betty Germaine after the publication of the nasty verses on her father.  The communication of the secret to Bishop Berkeley (who was one of Vanessa’s executors) may have been the condition of the suppressing Swift’s correspondence with her, and would have exasperated him to ferocity.

II

We cannot properly understand Swift’s cynicism and bring it into any relation of consistency with our belief in his natural amiability without taking his whole life into account.  Few give themselves the trouble to study his beginnings, and few, therefore, give weight enough to the fact that he made a false start.  He, the ground of whose nature was an acrid common-sense, whose eye magnified the canker till it effaced the rose, began as what would now be called a romantic poet.  With no mastery of verse, for even the English heroic (a balancing-pole which has enabled so many feebler men to walk the ticklish rope of momentary success) was uneasy to him, he essayed the Cowleian Pindarique, as the adjective was then rightly spelled with a hint of Parisian rather than Theban origin.  If the master was but a fresh example of the disasters that wait upon every new trial of the flying-machine, what could be expected of the disciple who had not even the secret of the mechanic wings, and who stuck solidly to the earth while with perfect good faith he went through all the motions of soaring?  Swift was soon aware of the ludicrousness of his experiment, though he never forgave Cousin Dryden for being aware of it also, and the recoil in a nature so intense as his was sudden and violent.  He who could not be a poet if he would, angrily resolved that he would not if he could.  Full-sail verse was beyond his skill, but he could manage the simpler fore-and-aft rig of Butler’s octosyllabics.  As Cowleyism was a trick of seeing everything as it was not, and calling everything something else than it was, he would see things as they were—­or as, in his sullen disgust, they seemed to be—­and call them all by their right names with a resentful emphasis.  He achieved the naked sincerity of a Hottentot—­nay, he even went beyond it in rejecting the feeble compromise of the breech-clout.