These instances of the temptation which most easily besets Mr. Forster are trifles, but the same leaning betrays him sometimes into graver mistakes of overestimate.  He calls Swift the best letter-writer in the language, though Gray, Walpole, Cowper, and Lamb be in some essential qualities his superiors.  He praises his political writing so extravagantly that we should think he had not read the “Examiner,” were it not for the thoroughness of his work in other respects.  All that Swift wrote in this kind was partisan, excellently fitted to its immediate purpose, as we might expect from his imperturbable good sense, but by its very nature ephemeral.  There is none of that reach of historical imagination, none of that grasp of the clue of fatal continuity and progression, none of that eye for country which divines the future highways of events, that makes the occasional pamphlets of Burke, with all their sobs of passionate sentiment, permanent acquisitions of political thinking.  Mr. Forster finds in Swift’s “Examiners” all the characteristic qualities of his mind and style, though we believe that a dispassionate reader would rather conclude that the author, as we have little doubt was the fact, was trying all along to conceal his personality under a disguise of decorous commonplace.  In the same uncritical way Mr. Forster tells us that “the ancients could show no such humor and satire as the ‘Tale of a Tub’ and the ’Battle of the Books.’” In spite of this, we shall continue to think Aristophanes and even Lucian clever writers, considering the rudeness of the times in which they lived.  The “Tale of a Tub” has several passages of rough-and-tumble satire as good as any of their kind, and some hints of deeper suggestion, but the fable is clumsy and the execution unequal and disjointed.  In conception the “Battle” is cleverer, and it contains perhaps the most perfect apologue in the language, but the best strokes of satire in it are personal (that of Dryden’s helmet, for instance), and we enjoy them with an uneasy feeling that we are accessaries in something like foul play.  Indeed, it may be said of Swift’s humor generally that it leaves us uncomfortable, and that it too often impregnates the memory with a savor of mortal corruption proof against all disinfectants.  Pure humor cannot flow from so turbid a source as soeva indignatio, and if man be so filthy and disgusting a creature as Swift represents him to be, if he be truly “by nature, reason, learning, blind,” satire is thrown away upon him for reform and cruel as castigation.

Mr. Forster not only rejects the story of Stella’s marriage with Swift as lacking substantial evidence, but thinks that the limits of their intercourse were early fixed and never overpassed.  According to him, their relation was to be, from the first, one “of affection, not desire.”  We, on the other hand, believe that she was the only woman Swift ever loved constantly, that he wished and meant to marry her, that he probably did marry her,[1] but