with suffering, that tore his heart and kindled that furnace of indignation against the stupid, the hateful, and the cruel to whom most suffering is due; and it was a furnace in which he himself was consumed.  Writing whilst he was still a youth, in The Tale of a Tub, he composed a terrible sentence, in which all his rage and pity and ironical bareness of style seem foretold:  “Last week,” he says, “I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.”  “Only a woman’s hair,” was found written on the packet in which the memorial of Stella was preserved, and I do not know in what elegy there breathes a prouder or more poignant sorrow.

When he wrote the Drapier Letters, Ireland lay before him like a woman flayed.  Of the misery of Ireland it was said (I think by Sheridan): 

“It fevered his blood, it broke his rest, it drove him at times half frantic with furious indignation, it sunk him at times in abysses of sullen despondency, it awoke in him emotions which in ordinary men are seldom excited save by personal injuries.”

This cruel rage over the wrongs of a people whom he did not love, and whom he repeatedly disowned, drove him to the savage denunciations in which he said of England’s nominee:  “It is no dishonour to submit to the lion, but who, with the figure of a man, can think with patience of being devoured alive by a rat?” It drove him also to the great principle, still too slowly struggling into recognition in this country, that “all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.”  It inspired his Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures, in which the advice to “burn everything that came from England except the coals and the people,” might serve as the motto of the Sinn Fein movement.  And it inspired also that other “Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from being a burden to their Parents and Country, and making them beneficial to the Public.  Fatten them up for the Dublin market; they will be delicious roast, baked, or boiled.”

As wave after wave of indignation passed over him, his wrath at oppression extended to all mankind.  In Gulliver’s Travels it is the human race that lies before him, how much altered for the worse by being flayed!  But it is not pity he feels for the victim now.  In man he only sees the littleness, the grossness, the stupidity, or the brutal degradation of Yahoos.  Unlike other satirists—­unlike Juvenal or Pope or the author of Penguin Island, who comes nearest to his manner—­he pours his contempt, not upon certain types of folly or examples of vice, but upon the race of man as a whole.  “I heartily hate,” he wrote to Pope soon after Gulliver was published, “I heartily hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.”  The philanthropist will often idealise man in the