ce would have been
wiser. Now and then his exaggeration is merely amusing, as where he
tells us that Swift, "as early as in his first two years after quitting
Dublin, was _accomplished in French_," the only authority for such a
statement being a letter of recommendation from Temple saying that he
"had _some French_." Such compulsory testimonials are not on their _voir
dire_ any more than epitaphs. So, in speaking of Betty Jones, with whom
in 1689 Swift had a flirtation that alarmed his mother, Mr. Forster
assumes that she "was an educated girl" on the sole ground, so far as
appears, of "her mother and Swift's being cousins." Swift, to be sure,
thirty years later, on receiving some letters from his old sweetheart,
"suspects them to be counterfeit" because "she spells like a
kitchen-maid," and this, perhaps, may be Mr. Forster's authority. But,
as the letters _were_ genuine, the inference should have been the other
way. The "letters to Eliza," by the way, which Swift in 1699 directs
Winder, his successor at Kilroot, to burn, were doubtless those
addressed to Betty Jones. Mr. Forster does not notice this; but that
Swift should have preserved them, or copies of them, is of some
consequence, as tending to show that they were mere exercises in
composition, thus confirming what he says in the remarkable letter to
Kendall, written in 1692, when he was already off with the old love and
on with a new.

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 characteri