starving, and we ourselves in cold and | beset a liberal education in Spain may be

nakedness? Mere creature comforts will do more for ourselves and for them than any bare words or a holding-up of exemplary lives. Among the women, too, more particularly, a brave burial and a worthy funeral is apparently more a matter of concern than even the loss they have sustained. All the comforting assurances with which kind neighbors ply them fail to create half as much personal satisfaction as the fact of their dead having "a decent" interment. Of all the physical conditions most conducive to a rough but | ready estimate of the character of any new acquaintance, or to give you an appreciable understanding of the neighbor beside whom you chance to take your seat, and which is as quick a process of discovering the "inner man” as any I know, is most certainly a dinner. A good dinner is a very safe criterion by which to form an opinion of another, and, let me add, a bad one will do equally as well. Whatever there is of good in a man - wit or humor, consideration or want of consideration, his pet foibles, or his peculiar ambitions, will all manifest themselves, and creep out bit by bit here and there, and proclaim the man despite himself, though to be sure you may be excluded from a certain share of unequable temper, and such minor failings as are more especially reserved for home use, or rather home abuse.

From Nature.

A FREE SPANISH UNIVERSITY.

OUR readers will easily understand what sort of a foster-mother a government like that of Spain will prove to education generally, and to scientific education and inquiry in particular. Any educational institution connected with such a State must necessarily be hampered and hindered in many ways, and the only chance of obtaining perfect liberty in scientific education and instruction is in being rid of all State interference. This has been so strongly felt in Spain by some of the foremost Spanish men of science and letters that they have formed an association to found an institution for free education. A prospectus of the institution has been forwarded us, and the difficulties which

learned from the fact that it is signed by ten ex-professors of the highest standing, all of whom have been removed from their chairs by government on account of their liberal opinions. Among these are the names of Augusto G. de Linares, exprofessor of natural history at the University of Santiago, and Laureano Calderon, ex-professor of organic chemistry at the same university. The object of the association, as stated in the prospectus, is to found at Madrid a free institution dedicated to the culture and propagation of science in its various branches, specially by means of education. A sort of joint-stock company will be constituted by shares of two hundred and fifty francs, payable in four instalments between July next and April 1877. A preliminary meeting was to be held on the Ist inst. to constitute the society, and we earnestly hope that a successful start has been made. The association will be directed by a council representing all parties interested. The institution itself will, of course, be perfectly free from all religious, philosophical, or political restrictions, its only principles being the "inviolability of science" and the perfect liberty of teaching. There will be established, according to the circumstances and means of the society (1) studies for general, secondary, and professional education with the academic advantages accorded by the laws of the State; (2) superior scientific studies; (3) lectures and brief courses, both scientific and popular; (4) competi tions, prizes, publication of book and reviews, etc. The greatest precautions will be taken to obtain as professors men of undoubted probity and earnestness and of the highest competence.

We need say nothing to our readers in recommendation of the above scheme. All who sincerely desire the welfare of Spain and the spread of scientific knowledge must sympathize with its promoters, who, we have every reason to believe, are men of the highest character and competency. We hope that not a few of our readers will show their sympathy with the object of the association by sending the moderate subscription which constitutes a shareholder to M. Laureano Figuerola, Calle de Alcalá, 72, Madrid.

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From The British Quarterly Review.
JONATHAN SWIFT.*

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told that the works of Swift want interest, that his genius has been eclipsed, and that the study of his writings may well be laid aside, as not "entering necessarily into the institution of a liberal education." And yet something like this is the verdict pronounced by Jeffrey in his critique on Sir Walter Scott's edition of Swift's works in 1816. He tells us how he remembers the time when every boy was set to read Pope, Swift, and Addison, as regularly as Virgil, Cicero, and Horace; when all who had any tincture of letters were familiar with their writings and their history; and when they and their contemporaries were placed without challenge at the head of our literature. He congratulates himself that this is no longer the case, and that these writers have been deposed from their pedestal; that their genius has been surpassed, and that they have no chance of recovering the supremacy from which they have been deposed. The language in which he goes on to speak of them is somewhat astonishing. They were remarkable, he says, for the fewness of their faults rather than for the greatness of their beauties. Their laurels were won by good conduct and discipline, not by enterprising boldness and native force. They had no pathos, no enthusiam, no comprehensiveness, depth, or originality; but were for the most part cold, timid, and superficial. Their inspiration is little more than a sprightly sort of good sense. They may pass well enough for sensible and polite writers, but scarcely for men of genius.

MR. FORSTER's long-looked-for life of Swift has at last appeared, and the completeness of this, its first volume, is enough to console us for the delay. The life of Swift was at first written incompetently by Delany and Dean Swift, afterwards hurriedly by Johnson; and a whole mass of misconceptions, repeated from hand to hand, had to be cleared away before his character could be reconstructed as it required to be. Popular opinion readily accepted the rough and ready estimate of Swift as one utterly dark and repulsive in life and genius; and where it took the trouble to verify this second-hand estimate, it found the estimate confirmed by the untested and rash assertions of one after another of his biographers. Mr. Forster has not brought help before it was greatly needed, and the niche of English literary biography which his book will fill is not less palpably vacant than those which he has already so ably occupied. The volume before us is perhaps chiefly valuable for the mass of new information which has been brought together either for the testing or the illustration of the facts asserted of Swift. We perhaps miss in the narrative something of succinctness and of thorough digesting of the matter; and it would be no very high compliment to the author of the "Life of Goldsmith" and of the monograph on Defoe to say that he has here surpassed or even equalled himself. But our knowledge of that part of Swift's life which is As we read the estimate of the Edinhere chiefly dealt with is at the best frag-burgh reviewer, we feel that not only does mentary, and in itself perhaps incapable of any very clear or succinct narration. It is enough that this book gives us for the first time much that is of incalculable value for a knowledge of the life of Swift, and that to the judgment of this new material Mr. Forster brings his own sound experience and fine literary tact.

Whatever the objections that an editor or a biographer of Swift may have to meet in our day, there is one from which he is probably exempt. He is not likely to be

The Life of Jonathan Swift. By JOHN FORSTER. Vol. 1. London: John Murray.

that estimate differ from our own, but that
the standpoint from which it is made is one
with which we are essentially out of sym-
pathy. The generation for which Jeffrey
wrote had no small share of self-compla-
cency, and it was a self-complacency forti-
fied by circumstances. It was a generation
of very considerable force and earnestness,
and that force and earnestness had a very
strong bias in one particular direction.
Such biassed force has its advantages,
but a wide-stretching sympathy, or a quick
sensibility to the genius of another age, is
not one of these. What is good in itself
it prizes, but it does so to the exclusion of

that which an age possessing perhaps less | creations great, but its literary criticism, stringent characteristics of its own may too, was keen, energetic, and incisive. It be ready to appreciate. For us, rivalry fairly claimed a great inheritance of rehas not made appreciation impossible. awakened life, and we need not.be surOur own generation has sought other prised if the strength that shook off slumobjects, and achieved a bias in a different ber had little delicacy of touch for the direction; but while the force of literary beauties which belonged to the state of genius may be thereby dulled, the absence repose. But the qualities which gave briland hopelessness of literary emulation liancy to its creations and energy to its may make our criticism none the less dis- criticisms were not those to inspire a interested. Our laurels are not chiefly subtle sympathy. It was a generation won in the fields where we may find Swift which left little room for doubts and waand Addison and their contemporaries for verings, for efforts at penetrating meaning, rivals, and we may content ourselves with for tender and careful searching after our power of judging the more calmly of hidden beauties. It could spare no time the merits of different competitors. We to learn excuses for faults that were apparcan no longer flatter ourselves with the ent on the surface; it had a rough and complacent optimism upon which the ready justice, which was much more fit to Edinburgh reviewer bases his judgment draw clear lines of demarcation between of literary progress; we can no longer what it believed good and bad, than to assent with him to the proposition that in temper its condemnation of that with literary taste every generation is better which it happened to disagree. Above all, than its predecessors. Instead of believing one vice tainted every part of its criticism. with him that such taste "is of all facul- Not only was distinction of political party ties the one most sure to advance with made the gauge of literary merit, but all time and experience," we are more likely literary criticism was steeped in the strong to be impressed with the extreme delicacy wine of a political creed. The Edinburgh of its growth; with the dangers to which reviewer turned from a discussion on it is exposed of being blinded or for- reform to apply, of set purpose, all the malized by every twist and turn of popu- tools of his trade to literature. He prolar fanaticism or prevailing pedantry; ceeded upon the same maxims and he set with the likelihood that development in to work in the same way. Whiggism is other directions may only disarrange the the one god, and the Edinburgh Review equable balance, the "sweet reasonable- is its prophet," was the foundation of his ness," as the chief critic of our genera- system, and that system was untroubled tion has it, of literary judgment. What by any qualms or doubts. It afforded a the Edinburgh reviewer feels to be "little ready recipe for dealing with any question. capricious fluctuations," we may often be If a judgment on any subject could not, disposed to think serious aberrations, and like that of the German philosopher on we may see in them the loss of that quick the white elephant, be evolved by the appreciativeness which only the stirring of Edinburgh reviewer from the depths of a new birth in literature could restore. his own inner consciousness, it was yet But if we lose the gratification of believ- easy to procure it from the repertory of ing in this comfortable natural law of pro- that storehouse of dogma whose key was gression in literary taste, we escape the held by his own clique. Whatever the risk of being blind to the beauties of a brilliancy of its creation, whatever the state of less complete and perfect evolu- energy of its criticism, the generation was tion. We relinquish the claim of rivalry, penetrated to the very core with the politbut we can solace ourselves with the ical spirit, and had no very great patience recovery of the power of unbiassed judg- with any other. The very masterpieces which gave lustre to the age were gauged by the same criteria, and misjudged with the same rashness, until certain coincidences between these and the prevailing

ment.

The generation for which Jeffrey wrote had undoubtedly much reason for self-congratulation. Not only were its literary

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