ambitious attempt to read the riddle of Swift's unhappy life
is made with so much presumption and so little judgment, so much boldness and Do little skill, that it entirely fails. The book is fall of anachronisms, extending to criticisms of literature of the present day by Jonathan Swift, and outbursts of wrath against the Irish Land Act and the Liberal Government ; it also displays the author's ignorance of the practices of the Roman Catholic Church, although that Church is.the prime object of his abhorrence. Here is an instance. Swift and Stella visit the cottage of a poor woman whose child has just died of a lingering illness. They find the bereaved mother in agonising grief, crying to God to take her soul as a ran- som for her son's. This is Swift's interpretation of her feelings :— "It flashed across him that Mrs. Grey was a Papist, and that her boy had never been baptised. Did she fear she had lost him for ever 2" A writer who is so ignorant of what Papists believe and do as not to know that the child would most certainly have been bap- tised, because, under the circumstances which he describes, the mother herself would have been perfectly competent to baptise him, would do better to leave these matters alone. The constant intrusion of himself between his subject and his readers would destroy the effect of the book, even if it had been a much better one ; but it possesses no merit. The author's Jonathan Swift is a clumsy caricature, and all the other personages introduced—Bolingbroke, Steele, Prior,
are puppets jerked by an unskilful band. The writer, we do not know on what authority, spells " Vanhomrigh" " Vanhomrich."
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