“Of all the ways that wisest men could find,
    To mend the age and mortify mankind,
    Satire, well writ, has most successful prov’d. 
    And cures, because the remedy is lov’d.”

To produce, however, the full effect, satire must possess a certain degree of impartiality, and be levelled in all instances at the vices or follies, and not at the man.  The first sketch of Gulliver’s Travels occurs in the proposed Travels of Martinus Scriblerus, devised in that pleasing society where most of Swift’s miscellanies were planned.  Had the work, however, been executed under the same auspices, it would probably, as Sir Walter Scott has suggested,[1] “have been occupied by that personal satire, upon obscure and unworthy contemporaries, to which Pope was but too much addicted.  But when the Dean mused in solitude over the execution of his plan, it assumed at once a more grand and a darker complexion.  The spirit of indignant hatred and contempt with which he regarded the mass of humanity; his quiet and powerful perception of their failings, errors, and crimes; his zeal for liberty and freedom of thought, tended at once to generalize, while it embittered, his satire, and to change traits of personal severity for that deep shade of censure which Gulliver’s Travels throw upon mankind universally.”  Most of the sentiments which impressed Swift, seem also to have been felt by the unknown author of the work before us:  it is not, however, free from personal allusions; but they are all conveyed in so good natured a manner, as to satisfy the reader that the author has been solicitous to animadvert only on the vices of the individual; and in no part of the work is there the slightest evidence of prejudice or venom.

The pseudo Joseph Atterley, the hero of the narrative, was born in Huntingdon, Long-Island, on the 11th of May, 1786.  He was the son of a seafaring individual, who, by means of the portion he received by his wife, together with his own earnings, was enabled to quit that laborious occupation, and to enter into trade; and, after the death of his father-in-law, by whose will he received a handsome accession to his property, he sought, in the city of New-York, a theatre better adapted to his enlarged capital.  “He here engaged in foreign trade, and partaking of the prosperity which then attended American commerce, gradually extended his business, and finally embarked in the then new branch of traffic to the East Indies and China; he was now generally respected both for his wealth and fair dealing; was several years a director in one of the insurance offices; was president of the society for relieving the widows and orphans of distressed seamen; and, it is said, might have been chosen alderman, if he had not refused, on the ground that he did not think himself qualified.”