THIS book contains a good deal that is new to the public. It corrects some mistakes as to Swift; it adds something to our means of judging of him, and is, on the whole, creditable to the diligence and the intelligence of its distinguished author. Mr. Wilde is the editor of the Dublin Medical Journal, and this volume is an enlargement of a professional essay, published in that useful periodical, in reply to some inquiries addressed to him by Dr. M'Kenzie of Glasgow, as to the character of the disease which clouded so many years of Dean Swift's life, and which exhibited its true character in the extinction of all mental power, long before the period of his actual death.

It was impossible for Mr. Wilde to examine the case of Swift as a mere medical question, without his being led to look into forgotten pamphlets and old repositories of the thousand trifles which the interest about a great man led fanciful people to preserve. VOL. XVIII. NO. II.

From these sources he has revived some old recollections of Stella, and others connected with Swift, and has been fortunate enough to recover what we are inclined to think a genuine portrait of that lady, which is engraved for his volume. He has been also fortunate enough to find an old almanack with verses in Swift's hand-writing bound up within the same cover, and has, in this way, added a few poems of no great merit, and of doubtful authenticity, to the mass of Swift's works, already too large-for each successive editor has increased the bulk of what he was bringing before the public, by every trifle, which, whether written by Swift or by any of his acquaintances, could by any pretense be connected with his name. The book, however, is of great value. An obscure disease which clouded with mystery much of Swift's life, which, while men forbore to call it insanity, perplexed every one of his friends with strange misgivings, and

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