All the earlier biographers of Swift Mr. Forster brushes contemptuously aside, though we do not find much that is important in his own biography which industry may not hit upon somewhere or other in the confused narrative of Sheridan, for whom and for his sources of information he shows a somewhat unjust contempt.  He goes so far as sometimes to discredit anecdotes so thoroughly characteristic of Swift that he cannot resist copying them himself.  He labors at needless length the question of Swift’s standing in college, and seems to prove that it was not contemptible, though there can be no doubt that the contrary opinion was founded on Swift’s own assertion, often repeated.  We say he seems to prove it, for we are by no means satisfied which of the two Swifts on the college list, of which a facsimile is given, is the future Dean.  Mr. Forster assumes that the names are ranked in the order of seniority, but they are more likely to have been arranged alphabetically, in which case Jonathan would have preceded Thomas, and at best there is little to choose between three mediocriters and one male, one bene, and one negligenter.  The document, whatever we may think of its importance, has been brought to light by Mr. Forster.  Of his other materials hitherto unpublished, the most important is a letter proving that Swift’s Whig friends did their best to make him a bishop in 1707.  This shows that his own later account of the reasons of his change from Whig to Tory, if not absolutely untrue, is at least unjust to his former associates, and had been shaped to meet the charge of inconsistency if not of desertion to the enemy.  Whatever the motives of his change, it would have been impossible to convince a sincere Whig of their honesty, and in spite of Mr. Forster’s assertion that Addison continued to love and trust him to the last, we do not believe that there was any cordiality in their intercourse after 1710.  No one familiar with Swift’s manner of thinking will deem his political course of much import in judging of his moral character.  At the bottom of his heart he had an impartial contempt for both parties, and a firm persuasion that the aims of both were more or less consciously selfish.  Even if sincere, the matters at issue between them were as despicable to a sound judgment as that which divided the Big and Little-endians in Lilliput.  With him the question was simply one between men who galled his pride and men who flattered it.  Sunderland and Somers treated him as a serviceable inferior; Harley and Bolingbroke had the wit to receive him on a footing of friendship.  To him they were all, more or less indifferently, rounds in the ladder by which he hoped to climb.  He always claimed to have been a consistent Old Whig—­that is, as he understood it, a High-Churchman who accepted the Revolution of 1688.  This, to be sure, was not quite true, but it could not have been hard for a man who prided himself on a Cavalier grandfather,