the background, lest we come between the wind and their
nobility."

If the _homunculus_ who wrote this be still above ground, {318} how
devoutly must he hope he may be able to keep in the background! But the
chief blame falls on the editor. The title of the article is:

"The new school of superficial pantology; a speech intended to be delivered
before a defunct Mechanics' Institute. By Swallow Swift, late M.P. for the
Borough of Cockney-Cloud, Witsbury: reprinted Balloon Island, Bubble year,
month _Ventose_. Long live Charlatan!"

As a rule, orthodox theologians should avoid humor, a weapon which all
history shows to be very difficult to employ in favor of establishment, and
which, nine times out of ten, leaves its wielder fighting on the side of
heterodoxy. Theological argument, when not enlivened by bigotry, is seldom
worse than narcotic: but theological fun, when not covert heresy, is almost
always sialagogue. The article in question is a craze, which no editor
should have admitted, except after severe inspection by qualified persons.
The author of this wit committed a mistake which occurs now and then in old
satire, the confusion between himself and the party aimed at. He ought to
be reviewing this fictitious book, but every now and then the article
becomes the book itself; not by quotation, but by the writer forgetting
that _he_ is not Mr. Swallow Swift, but his reviewer. In fact he and Mr. S.
Swift had each had a dose of the _Devil's Elixir_. A novel so called,
published about forty years ago, proceeds upon a legend of this kind. If
two parties both drink of the elixir, their identities get curiously
intermingled; each turns up in the character of the other throughout the
three volumes, without having his ideas clear as to whether he be himself
or the other. There is a similar confusion in the answer made to the famous
_Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_:[687] it is headed _Lamentationes Obscurorum
Virorum_.[688] {319} This is not a retort of the writer, throwing back the
imputation: the obscure men who had been satirized are themselves made, by
name, to wince under the disapprobation which the Pope had expressed at the
satire upon themselves.

Of course the book here reviewed is a transparent forgery. But I do not
know how often it may have happened that the book, in the journals which
always put a title at the head, may have been written after the review.
About the year 1830 a friend showed me the proof of an artic