in the morbid mood he was utterly reckless of the means of vengeance.  His most playful scratch had poison in it.  His eye was equally terrible for the weak point of friend and foe.  But giving this all the value it may deserve, the weight of the evidence is in favor of his amiability.  The testimony of a man so sweet-natured and fair-minded as Dr. Delany ought to be conclusive, and we do not wonder that Mr. Forster should lay great stress upon it.  The depreciatory conclusions of Dr. Johnson are doubtless entitled to consideration; but his evidence is all from hearsay, and there were properties in Swift that aroused in him so hearty a moral repulsion as to disenable him for an unprejudiced opinion.  Admirable as the rough-and-ready conclusions of his robust understanding often are, he was better fitted to reckon the quantity of a man’s mind than the quality of it—­the real test of its value; and there is something almost comically pathetic in the good faith with which he applies his beer-measure to juices that could fairly plead their privilege to be gauged by the wine standard.  Mr. Forster’s partiality qualifies him for a fairer judgment of Swift than any which Johnson was capable of forming, or, indeed, would have given himself the trouble to form.

But this partiality in a biographer, though to be allowed and even commended as a quickener of insight, should not be strong enough to warp his mind from its judicial level.  While we think that Mr. Forster is mainly right in his estimate of Swift’s character, and altogether so in insisting on trying him by documentary rather than hearsay evidence, it is equally true that he is sometimes betrayed into overestimates, and into positive statement, where favorable inference 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.