stic 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 only when all hope of the old
open-hearted confidence was gone forever, chiefly through his own fault,
if partly through her jealous misconception of his relation to Vanessa,
and that it was the sense of his own weakness, which admitted of no
explanation tolerable to an injured woman, and entailed upon a brief
folly all the consequences of guilt, that more than all else darkened
his lonely decline with unavailing regrets and embittered it with
remorseful self-contempt. Nothing could be more