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.
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