Mr. Roscoe appears to believe that everybody who regards unfavorably Swift's genius and morals, must be actuated by envy or party spirit, but very few of the later or earlier critics are of his opinion. In the first place, most honorable men would rather remain unknown through eternity than accept the Dean's reputation. As Savage Landor says, he was "irreverential to the great and to God: an ill-tempered, sour, supercilious man, who flattered some of the worst and maligned some of the best men that ever lived." Whatever services he performed for the party from which he apostatized, there is nothing in his more permanent writings which can be of the slightest advantage to English toryism. Indeed, in politics and in morals, he appears never to have had any fixed principles. He served the party which he thought most likely to make him a bishop, and deserted it when he discovered that it was losing ground. He studied government not as a statesman but as a partisan, as a hardy, active, and unscrupulous Swiss, who could and would do much dirty work for a minister, if he saw reason to anticipate a liberal compensation. He however always extravagantly exaggerated his own powers, and so have his biographers, and so has the writer of the following article from _The Times_, who seems to have accepted with too little scrutiny the estimate he made of himself. The complacency with which he frequently refers to his supposed influence over the ministers is simply ludicrous. He entirely loses sight of both his own position and theirs. Shrewd as he shows himself under other circumstances, he is here as verdant as the greenest peasant from the forest. "I use the ministers like dogs," he says in a letter to Stella, but in reality the ministers made a dog of him, employing him to fetch and carry, and bark, and growl, and show his sharp teeth to their enemies; and when the noise he had made had served their purpose,--when he had frightened away many of their assailants, and by the dirt and stench he had raised had compelled even their friends to stand aloof, they cashiered him, as they would a mastiff grown toothless and incapable of barking. With no more dirty work for him to do, they sent him over to Dublin, to be rid of his presence.