In dealing with an author so desultory as Mr Schlosser, the critic has a right to an extra allowance of desultoriness for his own share; so excuse me, reader, for rushing at once into angry business.

Of Swift, Mr Schlosser selects for notice three worksthe "Drapier's Letters," "Gulliver's Travels," and the "Tale of a Tub." With respect to the first, as it is a necessity of Mr S. to be for ever wrong in his substratum of facts, he adopts the old erroneous account of Wood's contract as to the copper coinage, and of the imaginary wrong which it inflicted on Ireland. Of all Swift's villanies for the sake of popularity, and still more for the sake of wielding this popularity vindictively, none is so scandalous as this. In any new Life of Swift the case must be stated de novo. Even Sir Walter Scott is not impartial; and for the same reason as now forces me to blink it-viz., the difficulty of presenting the details in a readable shape. "Gulliver's Travels " Schlosser strangely considers "spun out to an intolerable extent." Many evil things might be said of Gulliver; but not this. The captain is anything but tedious. And, indeed, it becomes a question of mere mensuration, that can be settled in a moment. A year or two since I had in my hands a pocket edition, comprehending all the four parts of the worthy skipper's adventures within a single volume of 420 pages. Some part of the space was also wasted on notes, often very

the algebraic meaning of a negative quantity [so generally misunderstood as a negation of quantity, and which even Sir Isaac Newton misconstrued as regarded its metaphysics], great would have been the service rendered to logic by Kant. But there is a greater. From this little brochure I am satisfied was derived originally the German regeneration of the Dynamic philosophy, its expansion through the idea of polarity, indifference, &c. Oh, Mr Schlosser, you had not geprüft p. 5 of vol. ii. You skipped the notes.

idle. Now the first part contains two separate voyages (Lilliput and Blefescu); the 2d, one; the 3d, five; and the 4th, one; so that, in all, this active navigator, who has enriched geography, I hope, with something of a higher quality than your old muffs that thought much of doubling Cape Horn, here gives us nine great voyages of discovery far more surprising than the pretended discoveries of Sinbad (which are known to be fabulous), averaging quam proximè forty-seven 16mo pages each. Oh, you unconscionable German, built round in your own country with circumvallations of impregnable 4tos, oftentimes dark and dull as Avernus-that you will have the face to describe dear excellent Captain Lemuel Gulliver of Redriff, and subsequently of Newark, that "darling of children and men," as tedious. It is exactly because he is not tedious, because he does not shoot into German foliosity, that Schlosser finds him "intolerable." I have justly transferred to Gulliver's use the words, "darling of children and men," originally applied by the poet to the robinredbreast; for it is remarkable that "Gulliver" and the "Arabian Nights" are amongst the few books where children and men find themselves meeting and jostling each other. This was the case from its first publication, just one hundred and thirty years since. "It was received," says Dr Johnson, "with such avidity, that the price of the first edition was raised before the second could be made it was read by the high and the low, the learned and the illiterate. Criticism was lost in wonder." Now, on the contrary, Schlosser wonders not at all, but simply criticises; which we could bear, if the criticism were even ingenious. Whereas, he utterly misunderstands

* "By the poet:"-viz., Wordsworth.

Swift; and is a malicious calumniator of the captain; who, luckily, roaming in Sherwood Forest, and thinking, often with a sigh, of his little nurse,* Glumdalclitch, would trouble himself slightly about what Heidelberg might say in the next century. There is but one example on our earth of a novel received with such indiscriminate applause as "Gulliver;" and that was "Don Quixote." Many have been welcomed joyfully by a class-these two by a people. Now, could that have happened had it been characterised by dulness? Of all faults, it could least have had that. As to the "Tale of a Tub," Schlosser is in such Cimmerian vapours, that no system of bellows could blow open a shaft or tube through which he might gain a glimpse of the English truth and daylight, or we gain a glimpse of Schlosser sitting over his German black-beer. It is useless talking to such a man on such a subject. I consign him to the attentions of some patriotic Irish

man.

Schlosser, however, is right in a graver reflection which he makes upon the prevailing philosophy of Swift-viz., that "all his views were directed towards what was immediately beneficial, which is the characteristic of savages."

* “Little nurse: "-The word Glumdalclitch, in Brobdingnagian, absolutely means little nurse, and nothing else. It may seem odd that the captain should call any nurse of Brobdingnag, however kind to him, by such an epithet as little; and the reader may fancy that Sherwood Forest had put it into his head, where Robin Hood always called his right hand man "Little John," not although, but expressly because John stood seven feet high in his stockings. But the truth is, that Glumdalclitch was little; and literally so; she was only nine years old, and (says the captain) "little of her age," being barely forty feet high. She had time to grow certainly, but, as she had so much to do before she could overtake other women, it is probable that she would turn out what, in Westmoreland, they call a little stiffenger-very little, if at all, higher than a common English church steeple.

This is undeniable. The meanness of Swift's nature, and his rigid incapacity for dealing with the grandeurs of the human spirit, with religion, with poetry, or even with science, when it rose above the mercenary practical, is absolutely appalling. His own yahoo is not a more abominable one-sided degradation of humanity, than is he himself under this aspect. And, perhaps, it places this incapacity of his in its strongest light, when we recur to the fact of his astonishment at a religious princess refusing to confer a bishoprick upon one that had treated the Trinity, and all the profoundest mysteries of Christianity, not with mere scepticism or casual sneer, but with set pompous merriment and farcical buffoonery. This dignitary of the church, Dean of the most conspicuous cathedral in Ireland, had, in full canonicals, made himself into a regular mounte bank, for the sake of giving fuller effect, by the force of contrast, to the silliest of jests directed against all that was most inalienable from Christianity. Ridiculing such things, could he, in any just sense, be thought a Christian? But, as Schlosser justly remarks, even ridiculing the peculiarities of Luther and Calvin as he did ridicule them, Swift could not be thought other than constitutionally incapable of religion. Even a Pagan philosopher, if made to understand the case, would be incapable of scoffing at any form, natural or casual, simple or distorted, which might be assumed by the most solemn of problems-problems that rest with the weight of worlds upon the human spirit

"Fix'd fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute”—

An

the destiny of man, or the relations of man to God. ger, therefore, Swift might feel, and he felt it to the end of his most wretched life; but what reasonable ground had

* See his bitter letters to Lady Suffolk.

a man of sense for astonishment that a princess, who (according to her knowledge) was sincerely pious, should decline to place such a man upon an episcopal throne? This argues, beyond a doubt, that Swift was in that state of constitutional irreligion-irreligion not from intellectual scepticism, but from a vulgar temperament-which imputes to everybody else its own plebeian feelings. People differed, he fancied, not by more and less religion, but by more and less dissimulation. And, therefore, it seemed to him scandalous that a princess, who must, of course, in her heart regard (in common with himself) all mysteries as solemn masks and mummeries, should pretend, in a case of downright serious business, to pump up, out of dry conventional hoaxes, any solid objection to a man of his shining merit. "The Trinity," for instance, that he viewed as the password which the knowing ones gave in answer to the challenge of the sentinel; but, as soon as it had obtained admission for the party within the gates of the camp, it was rightly dismissed to oblivion or to laughter. No case so much illustrates Swift's essential irreligion; since, if he had shared in ordinary human feelings on such subjects, not only he could not have been surprised at his own exclusion from the bench of bishops, after such ribaldries, but originally he would have abstained from them as inevitable bars to clerical promotion, even upon principles of public decorum.

As to the style of Swift, Mr Schlosser shows himself without sensibility in his objections, as the hackneyed English reader shows himself without philosophic knowledge of style in his applause. Schlosser thinks the style of Gulliver "somewhat dull." This shows Schlosser's presumption in speaking upon a point where he wanted, first, original delicacy of tact; and, secondly, familiar know