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 article of his on the malt tax, for the next number of the _Edinburgh Review_. Nothing was wanting except the title of the book reviewed; I asked what it was. He sat down, and wrote as follows at the head, "The Maltster's Guide (pp. 124)," and said that would do as well as anything.