sion
and heaviness of heart. We have been perfect friends these thirty-five
years. Upon my advice they both came to Ireland, and have been ever
since my constant companions; and the remainder of my life will be a
very melancholy scene, when one of them is gone, whom I most esteemed,
upon the score of every good quality that can possibly recommend a human
creature." He would not for the world be present at her death: "I should
be a trouble to her, and a torment to myself." If Stella came to Dublin,
he begged that she might be lodged in some airy, healthy part, and not
in the Deanery, where too it would be improper for her to die. "There
is not a greater folly," he thinks, "than to contract too great and
intimate a friendship, which must always leave the survivor miserable."
To Dr. Stopford he wrote in similar terms of the "younger of the two"
"oldest and dearest friends I have in the world." "This was a person
of my own rearing and instructing from childhood, who excelled in every
good quality that can possibly accomplish a human creature.... I know
not what I am saying; but believe me that violent friendship is much
more lasting and as much engaging as violent love." To Dr. Sheridan he
said, "I look upon this to be the greatest event that can ever happen
to me; but all my preparation will not suffice to make me bear it like
a philosopher nor altogether like a Christian. There hath been the most
intimate friendship between us from our childhood, and the greatest
merit on her side that ever was in one human creature towards
another."(10) Pope alludes in a letter to Sheridan to the illness of
Swift's "particular friend," but with the exception of another reference
by Pope, and of a curiously flippant remark by Bolingbroke, the subject
is nowhere mentioned in Swift's correspondence with his literary and
fashionable friends in London.

Swift crossed to Ireland in August, fearing the worst; but Stella
rallied, and in the spring of 1727 he returned to London. In August,
however, there came alarming news, when Swift was himself suffering from
giddiness and deafness. To Dr. Sheridan he wrote that the last act of
life was always a tragedy at best: "it is a bitter aggravation to have
one's best friend go before one." Life was indifferent to him; if he
recovered from his disorder it would only be to feel the loss of "that
person for whose sake only life was worth preserving. I brought both
those friends over that we might be happy