disappointed. She was the one
star which brightened Swift's storm-tossed course; it is well that she
was spared seeing the wreck at the end.

The Journal to Stella is interesting from many points of view: for its
bearing upon Swift's relations with Stella and upon his own character;
for the light which it throws upon the history of the time and upon
prominent men of the day; and for the illustrations it contains of the
social life of people of various classes in London and elsewhere. The
fact that it was written without any thought of publication is one of
its greatest attractions. Swift jotted down his opinions, his hopes, his
disappointments, without thought of their being seen by anybody but his
correspondents. The letters are transparently natural. It has been said
more than once that the Journal, by the nature of the case, contains
no full-length portraits, and hardly any sketches. Swift mentions the
people he met, but rarely stops to draw a picture of them. But though
this is true, the casual remarks which he makes often give a vivid
impression of what he thought of the person of whom he is speaking, and
in many cases those few words form a chief part of our general estimate
of the man. There are but few people of note at the time who are not
mentioned in these pages. We see Queen Anne holding a Drawing-room in
her bedroom: "she looked at us round with her fan in her mouth, and once
a minute said about three words to some that were nearest her." We see
Harley, afterwards the Earl of Oxford, "a pure trifler," who was always
putting off important business; Bolingbroke, "a thorough rake"; the
prudent Lord Dartmouth, the other Secretary of State, from whom Swift
could never "work out a dinner." There is Marlborough, "covetous as
Hell, and ambitious as the prince of it," yet a great general and unduly
pressed by the Tories; and the volatile Earl of Peterborough, "above
fifty, and as active as one of five-and-twenty"--"the ramblingest lying
rogue on earth." We meet poor Congreve, nearly blind, and in fear
of losing his commissionership; the kindly Arbuthnot, the Queen's
physician; Addison, whom Swift met more and more rarely, busy with the
preparation and production of Cato; Steele, careless as ever, neglecting
important appointments, and "governed by his wife most abominably";
Prior, poet and diplomatist, with a "lean carcass"; and young
Berkeley of Trinity College, Dublin, "a very ingenious man and great
philosophe