common one of a self-indulgent propensity to engage female sympathy, without making the return for that sympathy demanded by female affection. And on that point, habemus confitentem reum. In a letter written before he took orders Swift replied as follows to some advice of a Leicester clergyman, whom he calls his 'good cousin,' referring to certain recent passages of love-making with one of his female acquaintances there. He wrote that

As to marriage, he does not belong to the kind of persons, of whom he has known a great number, that ruin themselves by it. A thousand household thoughts always drive matrimony out of his mind whenever it chances to come there; and his own cold temper and unconfined humour are of themselves a greater hindrance than any fear of that which is the subject of his friend's letter. I am naturally temperate; and never engaged in the contrary, which usually produces those effects.' At the same time he admits he has failings that might lead people, in regard to such matters, to suppose him serious, while he had no other design other than to entertain himself when idle, or when something went amiss in his affairs; a thing, indeed, so common with him, that he could remember twenty women in his life to whom he had behaved himself just the same way. 'I shall speak plainly to you,' he added. And then came words which certainly foreshadow, if they do not make intelligible, the fate that was to join his name so strangely, through all future time, to that of her who then lived under the same roof with him, a child of ten years old. 'The very ordinary observations I made with going half a mile beyond the University have taught me experience enough not to think of marriage till I settle my fortune in the world, which I am sure will not be in some years; and even then I am so hard to please myself, that I suppose I shall put it off to the other world.'

That habit of indecisive, inconclusive gallantry to amuse idle time-which, as we have seen, Swift wrote that 'should he enter the Church, he would not find it hard to lay down in the porch '—he did not lay down in the porch, but carried into years of mature clerical manhood, when it had lost the excuse-whatever that might be worth of thoughtlessness. Swift, like Goethe, was exceedingly susceptible of female influences, but, like Goethe, reserved an interior self, which 1 Forster's Life, pp. 64, 65.

I

remained impassible to them. Each exerted the powers of pleasing which each possessed to attract female affections, which neither was prepared to reciprocate to the extent of undivided devotion to one object; and the result in both cases was what we must call tragical. Swift had to complain, in his later joyless years, that his female friends had forsaken him,' and Goethe-after tearing himself loose from an honourable love on very small motives-suffered a woman every way his inferior, whom he himself acknowledged to be a 'poor creature,' to throw herself into his arms unconditionally, and fasten for life her vulgarity on the ultra-refinement of his studiously composed existence.2 Such were the fruits, in each case, of over-calculation or over-fastidiousness -in short, selfishness. In Swift's case there is still an element of mystery, for the solution of which, if any more complete solution is possible, we have some right to look, and shall look with curiosity and interest, to the sequel of Mr. Forster's vigorous and sympathetic Apologia for the genius and character of the extraordinary man he has made his subject.

In the meanwhile let us just remind those who, while enjoying Swift the writer, are unmeasured in their denunciations of Swift the man, that had not the man been what he was, the world never would have possessed the writer. If Swift had been a model of clerical decorum, the Tale of a Tub' must have remained unwritten; as, for that matter, so must Gulliver's Travels,' had Swift continued a staunch

In one of Swift's later letters to Pope (February 7, 1736) we find the following passage, which is not without its pathos :-'What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen of years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was; which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not.'

2 Of all who have written, and written well on Goethe's relations to women, the only one we have met with who performs fearlessly the whole moral anatomy of the man is Mr. R. H. Hutton, in his Literary Essays, Mr. Hutton is of opinion that Goethe really loved Christiane Vulpius, whom, after cohabiting with her seventeen years, he married. If he did love her, it was a love compatible with slight esteem, and with tolerance of slight esteem of others for its object.

and satisfied Whig. The popular resurrection of Ireland would not have dated from the Drapier's Letters,' had not Walpole held Swift, like Bolingbroke, at arm's length, under the first Georges. Prince Posterity' must take the lot with all faults, and perhaps has no bad bargain.

We may say in conclusion, that Mr. Forster is almost the first of Swift's biographers or critics who takes real pains to explore all the sources of fresh information on his subject which have been opened to him by others, or which personal research and inquiry have opened for himself. Johnson slighted Mr. Deane Swift's offer to aid him with family traditions and documents. Scott worked up very readably into his short Memoir all the materials which came readily to hand, but does not seem to have thought it worth while to look far afield for more matter than he could bring within the compass of that Memoir. Jeffrey, in his essay on Swift, which he twice reprinted from his Review, did his worst to wash on again the party blacking which he thought Scott had been rather too disposed to wash off the character of a Whig convert to Toryism. Macaulay and Thackeray had their own political and literary humours to vent at Swift's expense; and both, as regarded facts, were content with that à-peu-près which was Sainte-Beuve's special horror, and with which, we may add, Mr. Forster is much too thorough-going in his championship of Swift's good fame to content himself. We must refer our readers to the preface of his present volume for the long list of tributaries, noble, reverend, collegiate, lettered, and bibliopolic from whom Mr. Forster acknowledges aids, or access to aids, in the shape of original documents illustrative of his subject which had hitherto been buried from the public eye in private repositories.

Swift has undergone the fate of all men whose characters have exhibited very pronounced features, rendered more pronounced and more unpleasing by age. He has been viewed at his worst. After his death, as before it, his genius has suffered sorrowful eclipse in misanthropy and mania. There seems to have been something the matter with his

head almost all through his life; and the final autopsy revealed hydrocephalus. But, as inveterate readers of Swift, we are grateful to Mr. Forster for reminding the world that in Swift's better days he had something else than water on the brain, or misanthropy in the heart. Swift, the author, must ever rank amongst the perennial honours of English literature; and the work before us, when completed, will, we are confident, place Swift the man-if not on so lofty a moral pedestal as seems designed for him by his biographer --at least in a position to engage a larger share of human sympathy than has hitherto been accorded him by the common run of readers, a generation of whom it may le said, at the present day, that they know not Jonathan.

117

IV.

JUNIUS AND FRANCIS.

1. The Identity of Junius with a distinguished Living Character Established Including the Supplement, consisting of Facsimiles of Handwriting and other Illustrations. By JOHN TAYLOR. Second Edition. Corrected and Enlarged. London, 1818.

2. Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, K.C.B. With Correspondence and Journals. Commenced by the late JOSEPH PARKES, Esq. Completed and Edited by HERMAN MERIVALE, M.A. In two Vols. London, 1867.

3. More about Junius. The Franciscan Theory unsound. By A. HAYWARD, Esq., Q.C.

4. The Handwriting of Junius Professionally Investigated. By Mr. CHARLES CHABOT, Expert. With Preface and Collateral Evidence. By the Hon. EDWARD TWISLETON. London, 1871.

5. The Last Phase in the Junius Controversy. By HERMAN MERIVALE. Cornhill Magazine, June 1871.'

6

[MR. GEORGE TREVELYAN, in the lively and interesting first instalment of his new History of Fox,' refers with just appreciation to the late Mr. Herman Merivale as an author who has written only too little and too unambitiously,' and whose completion of the memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, commenced by the late Joseph Parkes, has virtually set at rest the [Junian] controversy, that once threatened to be eternal.' In view of any yet possible galvanic resurrection of that controversy, it may not be useless, and cannot now be indiscreet, to extract the following observations from a private letter addressed by Mr. Merivale to the present writer so long back as April 1868.

'The real case for Francis consists in the extraordinary multitude of coincidences, not in the strength of each.

If I said that the committer of a crime as to which I was giving evidence had black hair, it would prove nothing; that he had one eye, not much; that he spoke Irish, but little; that he limped-that

From the Westminster Review, October 1871.