sant traffic ought to be more remunerative than an intermittent one. There are railways already so systematically worked that trains run upon them in as close succession as would be those proposed by the League. In fact, the scheme embraces questions of outlay and profit too intricate for hasty discussion. They are matters for estimate or calculation beyond the province of the superficial observer.

The reform we advocate is one of much more simple character, as well as of more immediate result, requiring no additional expense, and perhaps being the first step necessary towards the most important objects aimed at by the League. We think, indeed, that the railroad system of the country is susceptible of great improvement, and that it may be made to afford more accommodation in business and greater convenience to the traveller, with more public security against accident, and all this without needing any radical change. Its working organization is at present imperfect, and a large proportion of the officials who hold the more responsible places might be better qualified for their occupation. It has been seen that the expenses incurred for motive power, repairs of equipments, and maintenance of the line amount to seventy per cent of the whole expense of working. All inventions, therefore, which seem likely to economize fuel, to make the superstructure smoother and more durable, and to improve the machinery, ought to be reasonably encouraged, while efforts should be constantly making, through an interchange of information, to take advantage of the results of experience gained elsewhere, otherwise it will be found that there has been relatively a steady annual increase of expense in all the departments just now named, and, finally, there should be a school for railway management by means of a regular system of promotion in every department of a railroad in operation, to be relied upon as a matter of course, for the encouragement of faithful and efficient service. Those employed would then look to their own companies for long engagements, and would be less eager to find indirect means of increasing their remuneration.

ART. IV.-1. The Works of JONATHAN SWIFT. With Notes and a Life by SIR WALTER SCOTT. 19 Vols. Edinburgh. 1824. 2. Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin, in a Series of Letters from JOHN, EARL OF ORRERY, to his Son, the Honorable Hamilton Boyle. 4th Edition. London. 1752.

3. Observations upon Lord Orrery's Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, containing several singular Anecdotes relating to the Character and Conduct of that great Genius and the most deservedly celebrated Stella, in a Series of Letters to his Lordship. (By Patrick DeLANY.) London. 1754.

4. An Essay upon the Life, Writings, and Character of Dr. Jonathan Swift, interspersed with some Occasional Animadversions upon the Remarks of a late Critical Author upon the Observations on an Anonymous Writer on those Remarks. London. 1754.

5. A Letter to Dean Swift, Esq. on his Essay upon the Life, Writings, and Character of Dr. J. Swift. By the Author of the Observations on Lord Orrery's Remarks. London. 1755. 6. The Life of the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St.

Patrick's. By THOMAS SHERIDAN, A. M. London. 1784. 7. New and Curious Anecdotes of the late Dean Swift and his favorite Stella. Gentleman's Magazine, Nov. 1757.

8. An Essay on the Earlier Part of the Life of Swift. By the REV. JOHN BARRETT, D. D., and Vice-Provost of Trinity College, Dublin. London. 1808.

9. The Closing Years of Dean Swift's Life, with Remarks on Stella. By W. R. WILDE, M. D. Dublin. 1849. 10. DR. JOHNSON'S Lives of the Poets.

11. THACKERAY'S English Humorists, and Henry Esmond. 12. Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise. Par HENRI TAINE. Paris. 1866.

Two hundred years ago, the 30th of last November, a man was born whose memory has been treated with extreme harshness. Jonathan Swift is often spoken of as a renegade in politics and a hypocrite in religion; as brutal in private

life, and filthy in tastes and ideas; as tyrannical to his inferiors, servile to his superiors, and misanthropical always. He is regarded as an outlaw, whose hand was against every man, and to whom no man should show mercy, now that he is dead. It has fared with his character as with his personal appearance. The stern aspect, the "muddy complexion," the heavy features, the double chin in old age, are remembered; but his fine figure in youth and his bright blue eyes-"azure as the heavens," Pope called them have been forgotten. Ill-authenticated anecdotes of his later years, when he was alone in a half-civilized and oppressed country, stone-deaf and almost blind, the friends in correspondence with whom consisted his chief intellectual pleasure taken from him by death one after the other, his memory gone, his passions stimulated and his temper imbittered by a terrible disease that burnt into his brain, — stories of what he said and did after he had begun to "die at the top," as he foresaw he should do,- are used to solve the enigmas of his life. "There is no surer method," says Hawthorne, "of annihilating the magic influence of a great renown, than by exhibiting the possessor of it in the decline, the overthrow, and the utter degradation of his powers, - buried beneath his own mortality, and lacking even the qualities of sense that enable the most ordinary men to bear themselves decently in the eyes of the world." It was after he had reached the confines of this valley of the shadow of death that Swift wrote most of those exceptionable poems, which we read in boyhood, and which, later in life, we unreservedly condemn, with their author; forgetting that the tree may have borne better fruit than that of whose rottenest parts we indistinctly recall the fla

Scandalous falsehoods, born after Swift's decease, and killed in the cradle by conscientious biographers, have been revived. One of the vilest, mentioned by Sir Walter Scott only that it may "never be repeated on any future occasion," disgraces the memoir prefixed to a Dublin edition (1840) of Gulliver's Travels; and William Howitt, in " Homes and Haunts of Eminent British Poets," after quoting Scott, has the effrontery to add, that there may be "something" in the story after all,that early habits of dissipation may account for Swift's attacks of vertigo, and that "in this point of view his life presents a

deep moral lesson." Other biographers, who would scorn to give circulation to such slanders, are not ashamed to embody in their narrative discreditable stories that rest upon insufficient testimony, to reverse to Swift's prejudice the ordinary rules of evidence in criminal cases, and to condemn him with unjudicial warmth.

The superiority of Swift's understanding is admitted by all, and by none more readily - Dr. Johnson excepted than by his detractors. But his acknowledged genius is allowed to raise no presumption in favor of its possessor, no doubt as to the justness of the judgment against him, but serves to point an antithesis or to enforce a moral. "An immense genius," says Thackeray," an awful downfall and ruin." "I turn to his writings," concludes Lord Mahon's diatribe," and my contempt for the man is lost in my admiration of the author." But though a great man is not entitled to immunity from criticism, his critic is bound to approach the study in a generous spirit, to take into account the whole character, instead of fastening upon faults of manner or inequalities of temper, to consider the circumstances amid which the character was formed, and to hope, for the sake of human nature, that the casket was worthy of the divine jewel it held. But "the world is habitually unjust to such men," says Carlyle,-" unjust on many grounds, of which this one may be stated as the substance: it decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes, and not positively, but negatively, less on what is done right, than on what is or is not done wrong. Not the few inches of deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. This orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay, the circle of a gin-horse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured, and it is assumed that the diameter of the gin-horse and that of the planet will yield the same ratio, when compared with them. Here lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which we can never listen to with approval. Granted the ship comes into harbor with shrouds and tackle damaged; and the pilot is therefore blameworthy,

for he has not been all-wise and all-powerful; but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs."

In Swift's case, we unfortunately possess no record of his life, and no view of his character from the pen of any one who knew him in youth or in his prime. The four Irishmen whose recollections and hearsay anecdotes supply, with his writings and his friends' letters to him, the materials of all the biographies, made his acquaintance after his faculties began to decay, and his temper to suffer from disease and misfortune. Each lacks industry, insight, capacity to sift evidence. Each manifests so great a disposition to discredit the statements of the others, as to exemplify King William's observation, that, "if you should believe what Irishmen say, there is not one honest man in the whole kingdom." The first of these works in order of time, the worst in execution, and the least trustworthy upon disputed points, has enjoyed undeserved currency and exercised an undue influence upon subsequent writers because it was written by an earl. But Orrery first met Swift when Swift was seventy years old, and never saw much of him. He was so ignorant that his own father, a man of learning, disinherited him of his library, and so snobbish, that he could not understand how a man of humble origin could associate on equal terms with the nobility, and therefore declares that Swift was "employed, not trusted," by Oxford and Bolingbroke. Scott believes that this titled dunce never forgot Swift's indorsement upon a letter from him, of which the seal was unbroken,-"This will keep cool"; nor the impatient exclamation on receiving another beginning "Dear Swift,". "Boy, boy, boy!" The best of these Irish Lives is by Thomas Sheridan, father of Richard Brinsley; but Thomas was a mere child when Swift and his father were intimate, and he wrote nearly forty years after Swift's death, and with no adequate preparation or special fitness for the task. Had Swift been blessed with a Boswell, the popular view of his character might be far more favorable.

Bad as the books just spoken of are, they are not the worst. Mrs. Pilkington, the profligate wife of a lying clergyman, who