But no obliging tender friend
To help at my approaching end:
My life is now a burden grown
To others, ere it be my own.
Is it possible to conceive that this could be the case, while he was in the same country with his once adored Stella? But it is probable that resentment at his long neglect, and total change of behaviour toward her, as she was a woman of high spirit, might have fixed her, at that juncture, in a resolution of living separately from him in her country retirement, where the account of his illness might not have reached her. The arrival of Vanessa in Dublin, whose impatient love would not suffer her to stay long behind him, was the source of much inquietude to Swift. There was nothing he seemed to dread more than that his intimacy with her should take wind in Dublin. He had warned her of this in his farewell letter to her from Letcomb, before his departure. "If you are in Ireland when I am there, I shall see you very seldom. It is not a place for any freedom; but it is where every thing is known in a week, and magnified a hundred degrees. These are rigorous laws that must be passed through: but it is probable we may meet in London in winter; or, if not, leave all to fate, that seldom comes to humour our inclinations. I say all this out of the perfect esteem and friendship I have for you." And after her arrival he writes to the same effect. "I received your letter when some company was with me on Saturday night, and it put me in such confusion that I could not tell what to do. This morning a woman who does business for me, told
