hnson 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 to the other world." Soon
afterwards an opening for Swift presented itself. Sir William Temple,
now living in retirement at Moor Park, near Farnham, had been, like his
father, Master of the Irish Rolls, and had thus become acquainted with
Swift's uncle Godwin. Moreover, Lady Temple was related to Mrs. Swift,
as Lord Orrery tells us. Thanks to these facts, the application to
Sir William Temple was successful, and Swift went to live at Moor Park
before the end of 1689. There he read to Temple, wrote for him, and kept
his accounts, and growing into confidence with his employer, "was
often trusted with matters of great importance." The story--afterwards
improved upon by Lord Macaulay--that Swift received only 20 pounds
and his board, and was not allowed to sit at table with his master, is
wholly untrustworthy. Within three years of their first intercourse,
Temple had introduced his secretary to William the Third, and sent
him to London to urge the King to consent to a bill for triennial
Parliaments.

When Swift took up his residence at Moor Park he found there a little
girl of eight, daughter of a merchant named Edward Johnson, who had died
young. Swift says that Esther Johnson was born on March 18, 1681; in
the parish register of Richmond,(1) which shows that she was baptized on
March 20, 1680-81, her name is given as Hester; but she signed her
will "Esther," the name by which she was always known. Swift says, "Her
father was a younger brother of a good family in Nottinghamshire, her
mother of a lower degree; and indeed she had little to boast in her
birth." Mrs. Johnson had two children, Esther and Ann, an