Swift, as has been said, was one of the friends who was of great service to Berkeley when he went up to London for the first time. The witty and impecunious dean had then been living in London for more than four years, in his "lodging in Berry Street," absorbed in the political intrigue of the last years of Queen Anne, and sending to Stella, in Dublin, the daily journal, which so faithfully preserves the incidents of those years. Under date of an April Sunday in 1713, we find in this journal these lines, Swift's first mention of our present hero: "I went to court to-day on purpose to present Mr. Berkeley, one of our fellows at Trinity College. That Mr. Berkeley is a very ingenious man, and a great philosopher, and I have mentioned him to all the ministers, and have given them some of his writings, and I will favour him as much as I can."
In the natural course of things Berkeley soon heard much, though he saw scarcely anything, of Mrs. Vanhomrigh and her daughter, the latter the famous and unhappy "Vanessa," both of whom were settled at this time in Berry Street, near Swift, in a house where, Swift writes to Stella, "I loitered hot and lazy after my morning's work," and often dined "out of mere listlessness," keeping there "my best gown and perriwig" when at Chelsea.
Mrs. Vanhomrigh was the widow of a Dutch merchant, who had followed William the Third to Ireland, and there obtained places of profit, and her daughter, Esther, or Hester, as she is variously called, was a girl of eighteen when she first met Swift, and fell violently in love with him. This passion eventually proved the girl's perdition,--and was, as we shall see, the cause of a will which enabled Dean Berkeley to carry out his dear and cherished scheme of coming to America.
Swift's journal, frank about nearly everything else in the man's life, is significantly silent concerning Esther Vanhomrigh. And in truth there was little to be said to anybody, and nothing at all to be confided to Stella, in regard to this unhappy affair. That Swift was flattered to find this girl of eighteen, with beauty and accomplishment, caring so much for him, a man now forty-four, and bound by honour, if not by the Church, to Stella, one cannot doubt. At first, their relations seem to have been simply those of teacher and pupil, and this phase of the matter it is which is most particularly described in the famous poem, "Cadenus and Vanessa," written at Windsor in 1713, and first published after Vanessa's death.