wished that he
had a Hebraic nose. Several documents attest to Lowell's ideas on the
subject. He even claimed that his middle name "Russell" showed that he
had Jewish blood. A.M.]

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 i