Gulliver next visits Brobdingnag, where the inhabitants are sixty feet tall, and the affairs of ordinary human beings appear petty and insignificant.  The cats are as large as three oxen, and the dogs attain the size of four elephants.  Gulliver eats on a table thirty feet high, and trembles lest he may fall and break his neck.  The baby seizes Gulliver and tries to swallow his head.  Afterward the hero fights a desperate battle with two rats.  A monkey catches him and carries him to the almost infinite height of the house top.  Certainly, the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag merit Leslie Stephen’s criticism of being “almost the most delightful children’s book ever written.”

The third voyage, which takes him to Laputa, satirizes the philosophers.  We are taken through the academy at Lagado and are shown a typical philosopher:—­

“He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials, hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.  He told me he did not doubt that in eight years more he should be able to supply the governor’s gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate.”

In this voyage the Struldbrugs are described.  They are a race of men who, after the loss of every faculty and of every tie that binds them to earth, are doomed to continue living.  Dante never painted a stronger or a ghastlier picture.

On his fourth voyage, he visits the country of the Houyhnhnms and describes the Yahoos, who are the embodiment of all the detestable qualities of human beings.  The last two voyages are not pleasant reading, and one might wish that the author of two such inimitable tales as the adventures in Lilliput and Brobdingnag had stopped with these.

Children read Gulliver’s Travels for the story, but there is much more than a story in the work.  In its pages the historian finds allusions that throw much light on the history of the age.  Among the Lilliputians, for example, there is one party, known as the Bigendians, which insists that all eggs shall be broken open at the big end, while another party, called the Littleendians, contends that eggs shall be opened only at the little end.  These differences typify the quarrels of the age concerning religion and politics.  The Travels also contains much human philosophy.  The lover of satire is constantly delighted with the keenness of the thrusts.

General Characteristics.—­Swift is one of the greatest of English prose humorists.  He is noted also for wit of that satiric kind which enjoys the discomfiture of the victim.  A typical instance is shown in the way in which, under the assumed name of Isaac Bickerstaff, he dealt with an astrologer and maker of prophetic almanacs, whose name was Partridge.  Bickerstaff claimed to be an infallible astrologer, and predicted that Partridge would die March 29, 1708, at 11 P.M.  When that day had passed, Bickerstaff issued a pamphlet giving a circumstantial account of Partridge’s death.  Partridge, finding that his customers began to decrease, protested that he was alive.  Bickerstaff promptly replied that Partridge was dead by his own infallible rules of astrology, and that the man now claiming to be Partridge was a vile impostor.