United States or Belarus ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


She, poor wretch, was newer to her trade, and was like to faint. I knew the writing. I will see you tomorrow, if possible. You know it is not above five days since I saw you, and that I would ten times more, if it were at all convenient. Cad bids me tell you that, if you complain of difficult writing, he will give you enough to complain of. "Cad"? Then I remembered "Cadenus and Vanessa."

'T was at this time also that copies were handed about of his poem, "Cadenus and Vanessa," and 't was the very top of talk and admiration. Many might guess who was the lady, and the Dean was mighty angry, and said 'twas but a jest, and no friend to him who took it otherwise.

"Grown old in politicks and wit, Caress'd by ministers of State, Of half mankind the dread and hate."* *Cadenus and Vanessa. And he felt that he deserved reward for what he had done for his party. He thought that he should have been made a bishop.

This was the extent of his crime, and it would have been none if there had been no such previous impediment. This alone gives any meaning to what he says when Vanessa declared her love: Cadenus felt within him rise Shame, disappointment, guilt, surprise. Shame there might have been, but surely no guilt on any theory except that of an implicit engagement with Stella.

But she lived long enough to inflict a curious little piece of vengeance, the only vengeance in her power, except the nobler revenge of forgiveness, upon the false Cadenus. She had left by will all the property she possessed to the man she had so madly worshipped.

She was a young woman fond of literature, whom Decanus, the dean, called Cadenus by transposition of the letters, took pleasure in directing and instructing: till, from being proud of his praise, she grew fond of his person. Swift was then about forty-seven, at an age when vanity is strongly excited by the amorous attention of a young woman.

And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor ragged pocket, Nature suggested to him that he had turned his sentence well; and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell, misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact: John Wilkes's the ugliest man's in England saying, that with half-an-hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the land in any woman's good graces; Cadenus old and savage leading captive Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, "And a winning tongue had he," as much as to say, it is n't looks, after all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over, just as of old when it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to listen to his stuff and so did the mischief.

And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor ragged pocket, Nature suggested to him that he had turned his sentence well; and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell, misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact: John Wilkes's the ugliest man's in England saying, that with half-an-hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the land in any woman's good graces; Cadenus old and savage leading captive Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, "And a winning tongue had he," as much as to say, it is n't looks, after all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over, just as of old when it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to listen to his stuff and so did the mischief.

A fatherly old gentleman, who undertakes the care of a sprightly young girl, finds, to his astonishment, that little Miss spins all sorts of cobwebs round him. Grave professors and teachers cannot give lessons to their female pupils just as they give them to the coarser sex, and more than once has the fable of "Cadenus and Vanessa" been acted over by the most unlikely performers.

She thought herself neglected, and died of disappointment, having ordered, by her will, the poem to be published, in which Cadenus had proclaimed her excellence and confessed his love. The effect of the publication upon the Dean and Stella is thus related by Delany: The Dean made a tour to the south of Ireland for about two months at this time, to dissipate his thoughts and give place to obloquy.