much about the worthy alderman and Lord Mayor of Dublin, who duly enrolled his baby daughter Esther as a freewoman of Dublin in April 1688; a singular proceeding which establishes her age and makes her two years older, though no wiser, than Swift was given to understand. Whatever is known about Vanessa's connexion with Swift is carefully and cautiously set forth in this appendix, without any novel deductions. Dr Ball does not there refer to the notes which he inserted in vol. I as to Swift's taking Vanessa from Windsor to an Oxford inn in 1712— a conjecture based on the following ambiguous letter: 'I did not forget the coffee, for I thought you should not be robbed of it. John does not go to Oxford, so I send back the book as you desire. I would not see you for a thousand pounds if I could; but I am now in my night-gown, writing a dozen letters and packing up papers. Why, then, you should not have come; and I know that as well as you.

to go

'My service to your mother. I doubt you do wrong to Oxford, but now that is past, since you cannot be in London to-night; and if I do not inquire for acquaintance, but let somebody in the inn go about with you among the colleges, perhaps you will not be known. Adieu.'

Eight days later the Countess of Orkney wrote to him, referring to the disappointment of not receiving a visit from him, 'At first I feared Mr Collier was taken with a fit of apoplexy; the next line I read, I wished he had one.' On these hints Dr Ball comments (i, pp. 344–5) : 'Evidently Vanessa had come to Windsor; and probably either to please her fancy or to escape from a place where he was surrounded by acquaintances, Swift had consented to go with her to Oxford; ... in order to explain [to Lady Orkney] his absence his old friend Collier was revivified by Swift.'

It is ingeniously pieced together, the resurrected Mr Collier and all, and at first sight the escapade seemed plausible; but a second consideration convinces us that it is a case of reading between the lines what is not there. Scott's emendation of 'you' for 'I' in the last sentence of Swift's letter seems preferable. There is so much that is suspicious about the whole relationship that one very likely to 'smell a rat' where none is.

is

The Bishop of Ossory's introductory essay is a wise contribution to Swift criticism, gracefully expressed.

Dr Bernard writes as an historian and measures his great predecessor at St Patrick's by the standard of his times. Many points in the correspondence are touched in this introduction on which we have not space to dwell, but on none will the bishop be listened to with more attention than when he writes, with great insight and sympathy, on Swift's attitude towards religion. His conclusion is that, 'the evidence of Swift's correspondence, taken as a whole, is thus, I believe, entirely in favour of his religious sincerity. His mind was not the mind of an ecclesiastic, still less of a mystic; but, so far as we may see, his inmost convictions were not inconsistent with the creed of the Church which he served to the best of his powers. . . . Those who know a man best are the best judges of the secrets of his heart; and Swift's friends never questioned his sincerity in the exercise of his sacred calling. We may be content to accept their verdict' (i, 55).

Religious emotion, if he ever felt it, was out of fashion in his Church, and was one of those matters on which Swift chose to be reticent. His advice to his versatile friend, the Rev. Thomas Sheridan, D.D. (the hero of the unfortunate sermon on King George's accession day), on his appointment to a cure of souls, does not 'deal in mysteries.'

'Get some knowledge of tithes and Church livings. . . . Learn the extent of your parish. . . . Pray act like a man of this world. . . . Take care of the principal squire or squires. . . . Take the oaths heartily, and remember that party was not made for depending puppies' (iii, 245).

He was to be sure to call the family to prayers,' if he lay twenty miles away from his living. Dr Bernard is right. Swift was not an ecclesiastic, still less a mystic'; but we believe he was honest.

STANLEY LANE-POOLE.

Art. 4.-FATHER TYRRELL.

1. Autobiography and Life of George Tyrrell. By M. D. Petre. Two vols. London: Arnold, 1912.

2. Works by George Tyrrell: Nova et Vetera; Informal Meditations (1900); Through Scylla and Charybdis (1907); A Much-Abused Letter (1907); Mediævalism; a reply to Cardinal Mercier (1908); Christianity at the Cross-roads (1909). London: Longmans.

And other works.

THE life of Father Tyrrell is at once a study of temperament and a chapter of contemporary Church history. From the first point of view its psychological interest is great; from the second it is a document of exceptional importance. Its candour is entire; and the detachment of the biographer makes the irritating process of reading between the lines unnecessary. Miss Petre has said out all that there was to say with a frankness as honourable to herself as it is just to the distinguished man who, knowing where confidence was well bestowed, left his memory in her keeping. The trust has been discharged in the face of obstacles which might have daunted a less fine spirit; the terrors of the next world were called in to supplement the weapons of this.* Both were invoked in vain. Seldom has so worthy a monument been raised by a friend to a friend.

It is probable that the first feature, both of the Autobiography and of the Life, to strike the reader will be the complete absence of the usual characteristics of a religious memoir. The mannerism and pose of the professional pietist are wanting; and this is the man to the life. Had you looked for these things in him, you would have been disappointed; they were not there. He was very human, and was frankly not ashamed of being so. He knew, having seen it at close quarters, that the attempt to rise above nature ends, with few exceptions, in falling below it; he had had experience of the so-called ' 'supernatural,' and found it ugly and mean. 'I hope I am not humble, from what I have seen of humble men,' he used to say. The common life, the common lot sufficed him.

* The 'Times,' November 2, 1910. 'Histoire du Modernisme Catholique,' by A. Houtin, p. 326.

'I would rather risk hell on my own lines than secure heaven on those; I would rather share in the palpitating life of the sinful majority than enjoy the peace of the saintly few. . . . This is tantamount to a confession of worldliness, which I will not defend by a perverse application of the text, "God so loved the world." Yet I have always been disposed to blame the Good Shepherd for having lost His sheep, and to suspect the prodigal's father of having made home intolerable to his son; and, similarly, I cannot help laying half the sins and errors of the world on ecclesiastical shoulders, and siding with the accused against their judges' (i, 263).

The Autobiography (1861-84) describes the writer's early life, the various influences under which he fell, his entrance into and first years in the Jesuit Order. The impression left is one of profound melancholy. He had taken the wrong turning; and each successive step found him further from his destination. The years that the locust had eaten did but bring him back, worn and broken, to his starting-point; he ended where he had begun. Yet all, perhaps, was not loss.

'It is a good life's work to have arrived by personal experience and reflection at the solution of so plausible and complicated a fallacy as that of Jesuitism. Even though I end, weary and exhausted, at certain commonplace principles which are the public heritage of my age and country, made current coin long since by the labours of others, yet it seems to me that I possess them and feel them in a way that they never can who have had them for nothing, who have not worked their way through to them. . . . I look back with a sort of terror to the black wood in which for so many years I was lost, and from which God in His mercy has brought me forth to the light of liberty' (ii, 498-9).

His self-revelation differs from Newman's in being rather a confession than an apology; as Newman was the most self-centred, Tyrrell was the most selfless of men. He looks at himself from without, as a spectator; he might be a naturalist examining some strange form of life under the microscope, so destitute does he seem of personal interest in the result. Both were introspective; but, while Newman's temperament was essentially Puritan— from the age of fifteen he held with a full belief and assent the doctrine of eternal punishment'-Tyrrell's was

that of the curious Greek, interested for their own sake in life and mind. The Chthonian deities were not his.

'I cannot remember any time of my childhood, or afterwards, when the fear of hell or desire of heaven had the slightest practical effect on my conduct, one way or the other. Even now (1901) it never enters into my calculations as an effectual motive; nor have I, as a Catholic, ever cared or tried to gain an "indulgence”' (i, 22).

His sensibility was extreme: he could not take the life even of an insect;-'when I lift a worm from my path, I say, "So may God deal with me." "Your heavenly Father careth for them," gives me warrant for my folly on this point; and I do not care to amend.' His naturesense was strong; and he received impressions on the side of art more readily than on that of science. The sea, restless, loud-voiced, and almost human in its changing moods, meant more to him than the remote and silent stars. Like all sensitive children, he led a secret life, the key to which only he who lives it possesses. Language is the setting of common and organised experience; what is personal is inarticulate, and falls still-born, unless a certain Socratic midwifery is at hand. It is for the teacher to supply this; in Tyrrell's case no teacher with the requisite gift presented himself at the critical time. He outgrew the picture-religion' of childhood, and found nothing to replace it. The invisible world offered no reality to his awakening reason.

'If I wanted to excuse myself, I should say that the truth had never really been presented for my belief; that I identified it with the absurd anthropomorphisms of my babyhood, which my first reason instinctively assigned to the region of fairy-tales; that no one tried to show me the difference between the symbols and the realities symbolised. I fancy that much unbelief is due to this confusion; and that what men deny is not God, but some preposterous idol of their imagination' (i, 71).

To bring home to them this distinction is the problem of religious thought and the work of the religious teacher. But its difficulties, at least in our generation, are such as it is impossible to overstate.

His first interest in religion was intellectual. The Irish Protestantism in which he was brought up was