its importance,
has been brought to light by Mr. Forster. Of his other materials
hitherto unpublished, the most important is a letter proving that
Swift's Whig friends did their best to make him a bishop in 1707. This
shows that his own later account of the reasons of his change from Whig
to Tory, if not absolutely untrue, is at least unjust to his former
associates, and had been shaped to meet the charge of inconsistency if
not of desertion to the enemy. Whatever the motives of his change, it
would have been impossible to convince a sincere Whig of their honesty,
and in spite of Mr. Forster's assertion that Addison continued to love
and trust him to the last, we do not believe that there was any
cordiality in their intercourse after 1710. No one familiar with Swift's
manner of thinking will deem his political course of much import in
judging of his moral character. At the bottom of his heart he had an
impartial contempt for both parties, and a firm persuasion that the aims
of both were more or less consciously selfish. Even if sincere, the
matters at issue between them were as despicable to a sound judgment as
that which divided the Big and Little-endians in Lilliput. With him the
question was simply one between men who galled his pride and men who
flattered it. Sunderland and Somers treated him as a serviceable
inferior; Harley and Bolingbroke had the wit to receive him on a footing
of friendship. To him they were all, more or less indifferently, rounds
in the ladder by which he hoped to climb. He always claimed to have been
a consistent Old Whig--that is, as he understood it, a High-Churchman
who accepted the Revolution of 1688. This, to be sure, was not quite
true, but it could not have been hard for a man who prided himself on a
Cavalier grandfather, and whose first known verses were addressed to the
non-juring primate Sancroft after his deprivation, to become first a
Tory and then a conniver at the restoration of the Stuarts as the best
device for preventing a foreign succession and an endless chance of
civil war. A man of Swift's way of thinking would hardly have balked at
the scruple of creed, for he would not have deemed it possible that the
Pretender should have valued a kingdom at any lower rate than his
great-grandfather had done before him.

The more important part of Mr. Forster's fresh material is to come in
future volumes, if now, alas! we are ever to have them. For some of what
he gives us in this we c