FOOTNOTES.
[0a] Notes and Queries, Sixth Series, x. 287.
[0b] See letter from Swift to John Temple, February 1737. She was then “quite sunk with years and unwieldliness.”
[0c] Athenæum, Aug. 8, 1891.
[0d] Journal, May 4, 1711.
[0e] Craik’s Life of Swift, 269.
[0f] Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift, pp. 189–96.
[0g] In 1730 he wrote, “Those who have been married may form juster ideas of that estate than I can pretend to do” (Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift, p. 237).
[0h] Scott added a new incident which has become incorporated in the popular conception of Swift’s story. Delany is said to have met Swift rushing out of Archbishop King’s study, with a countenance of distraction, immediately after the wedding. King, who was in tears, said, “You have just met the most unhappy man on earth; but on the subject of his wretchedness you must never ask a question.” Will it be believed that Scott—who rejects Delany’s inference from this alleged incident—had no better authority for it than “a friend of his (Delany’s) relict”?
[0i] This incident, for which there is probably some foundation of fact—we cannot say how much—has been greatly expanded by Mrs. Woods in her novel Esther Vanhomrigh. Unfortunately most of her readers cannot, of course, judge exactly how far her story is a work of imagination.