"The sage, who said he should be proud
Of windows in his breast
Because he ne'er a thought allowed
That might not be confessed;
His window scrawled, by every rake,
His breast again would cover
And fairly bid the devil take
The diamond and the lover."
The members of the Kit Kat club used to write epigrams in honour of their "Toasts" on their wine glasses.[6]
He sometimes amused himself with writing ingenious riddles. Additional grace was added to them by giving them a poetic form. They differ from modern riddles, which are nearly all prose, and turn upon puns. They more resemble the old Greek and Roman enigmas, but have not their obscurity or simplicity. Most of them are long, but the following will serve as a specimen—
"We are little airy creatures
All of different voice and features;
One of us in glass is set,
One of us you'll find in jet
T'other you may see in tin,
And the fourth a box within
If the fifth you should pursue,
It can never fly from you."
This may have suggested to Miss C. Fanshawe her celebrated enigma on the letter H.
The humorous talent possessed by the Dean made him a great acquisition in society, and, as it appears, somewhat too fascinating to the fair sex. Ladies have never been able to decide satisfactorily why he did not marry. It may have been that having lived in grand houses, he did not think he had a competent income. In his thoughts on various subjects, he says, "Matrimony has many children, Repentance, Discord, Poverty, Jealousy, Sickness, Spleen, &c."
His sentimental and platonic friendship with young ladies, to whom he gave poetical names, made them historical, but not happy. "Stella," to whom he is supposed to have been privately married before her death, charmed him with her loveliness and wit. Some of his prettiest pieces, in which poetry is intermingled with humour, were written to her. In an address to her in 1719, on her attaining thirty-five years of age, after speaking of the affection travellers have for the old "Angel Inn," he says—
"Now this is Stella's case in fact
An angel's face a little cracked,
(Could poets or could painters fix
How angels look at thirty-six)
This drew us in at first to find
In such a form an angel's mind;
And every virtue now supplies
The fainting rays of Stella's eyes
See at her levée crowding swains
Whom Stella greatly entertains
With breeding humour, wit, and sense
And puts them out to small expense,
Their mind so plentifully fills
And makes such reasonable bills,
So little gets, for what she gives
We really wonder how she lives,
And had her stock been less, no doubt,
She must have long ago run out."
Swift says that Stella "always said the best thing in the company," but to judge by the specimens he has preserved, this must have been the opinion of a lover, unless the society she moved in was extremely dull. At the same time those who assert that her allusions were coarse, have no good foundation for such a calumny. Her humour contrasted with that of the Dean, both in its weakness and its delicacy. Swift was too fond of bringing forward into the light what should be concealed, but saw the fault in others, and imputed it to an absence of inventive power. He writes—
"You do not treat nature wisely by always striving to get beneath the surface. What to show and to conceal she knows, it is one of her eternal laws to put her best furniture forward."