If Mr. Forster’s mind had not the penetrative, illuminating quality of genius, he was not without some very definite qualifications for his task.  The sturdy temper of his intellect fits him for a subject which is beset with pitfalls for the sentimentalizer.  A finer sense might recoil before investigations whose importance is not at first so clear as their promise of unsavoriness.  So far as Mr. Forster has gone, we think he has succeeded in the highest duty of a biographer:  that of making his subject interesting and humanly sympathetic to the reader—­a feat surely of some difficulty with a professed cynic like Swift.  He lets him in the main tell his own story—­a method not always trustworthy, to be sure, but safer in the case of one who, whatever else he may have been, was almost brutally sincere when he could be so with safety or advantage.  Still, it should always be borne in mind that he could lie with an air of honest candor fit to deceive the very elect.  The author of the “Battle of the Books” (written in 1697) tells us in the preface to the Third Part of Temple’s “Miscellanea” (1701) that he “cannot well inform the reader upon what occasion” the essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning “was writ, having been at that time in another kingdom”; and the professed confidant of a ministry, whom the Stuart Papers have proved to have been in correspondence with the Pretender, puts on an air of innocence (in his “Enquiry into the Behavior of the Queen’s last Ministry”) and undertakes to convince us that nothing could be more absurd than to accuse them of Jacobitism.  It may be, as Orrery asserted, that Swift was “employed, not trusted,” but this is hardly to be reconciled with Lewis’s warning him on the Queen’s death to burn his papers, or his own jest to Harley about the one being beheaded and the other hanged.  The fact is that, while in certain contingencies Swift was as unscrupulous a liar as Voltaire, he was naturally open and truthful, and showed himself to be so whenever his passions or his interest would let him.  That Mr. Forster should make a hero of the man whose life he has undertaken to write is both natural and proper; for without sympathy there can be no right understanding, and a hearty admiration is alone capable of that generosity in the interpretation of conduct to which all men have a right, and which he needs most who most widely transcends the ordinary standards or most resolutely breaks with traditionary rules.  That so virile a character as Swift should have been attractive to women is not wonderful, but we think Mr. Forster has gone far towards proving that he was capable of winning the deep and lasting affection of men also.  Perhaps it may not always be safe to trust implicitly the fine phrases of his correspondents; for there can be no doubt that Swift inspired fear as well as love.  Revengefulness is the great and hateful blot on his character; his brooding temper turned slights into injuries, gave substance to mere suspicion, and once