In the twenty-seventh volume of the “European Magazine,” and in the two following volumes, a fair proportion of Swift’s notes were first published.  These were reprinted by Dr. Burnet in 1808, in his “Essay on the Earlier Part of the Life of Swift.”  Both these authorities have been consulted.  Dr. Routh’s modesty forbade him including six of the notes, because they were “not written with the requisite decorum.”  These have been included here.  Mr. Osmund Airy has “thought it unadvisable to encumber the pages with simple terms of abuse”; but an editor of Swift’s works cannot permit himself this licence.  His duty is to include everything.

The text of the “Short Remarks” is taken from vol. viii., Part 1, of the quarto edition of Swift’s works, edited by Deane Swift, and published in 1765.

[T.S.]

  SHORT REMARKS ON
  BISHOP BURNET’S HISTORY.

This author is in most particulars the worst qualified for an historian that ever I met with.  His style is rough, full of improprieties, in expressions often Scotch, and often such as are used by the meanest people.[1] He discovers a great scarcity of words and phrases, by repeating the same several hundred times, for want of capacity to vary them.  His observations are mean and trite, and very often false.  His secret history is generally made up of coffeehouse scandals, or at best from reports at the third, fourth, or fifth hand.  The account of the Pretender’s birth, would only become an old woman in a chimney-corner.  His vanity runs intolerably through the whole book, affecting to have been of consequence at nineteen years old, and while he was a little Scotch parson of forty pounds a year.  He was a gentleman born, and, in the time of his youth and vigour, drew in an old maiden daughter of a Scotch earl to marry him.[2] His characters are miserably wrought, in many things mistaken, and all of them detracting,[3] except of those who were friends to the Presbyterians.  That early love of liberty he boasts of is absolutely false; for the first book that I believe he ever published is an entire treatise in favour of passive obedience and absolute power; so that his reflections on the clergy, for asserting, and then changing those principles, come very improperly from him.  He is the most partial of all writers that ever pretended so much to impartiality; and yet I, who knew him well, am convinced that he is as impartial as he could possibly find in his heart; I am sure more than I ever expected from him; particularly in his accounts of the Papist and fanatic plots.  This work may be more properly called “A History of Scotland during the Author’s Time, with some Digressions relating to England,” rather than deserve the title he gives it.  For I believe two thirds of it relate only to that beggarly nation, and their insignificant brangles and factions.  What he succeeds best in, is in giving extracts of arguments and debates in council or Parliament.  Nothing recommends his book but the recency of the