It must be so:  Plato, thou reasonest well, etc.

[Illustration:  Dryden, Addison, Pope, Swift]

The greatest of the Queen Anne wits, and one of the most savage and powerful satirists that ever lived, was Jonathan Swift.  As secretary in the family of Sir William Temple, and domestic chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, he had known in youth the bitterness of poverty and dependence.  Afterward he wrote himself into influence with the Tory ministry, and was promised a bishopric, but was put off with the deanery of St. Patrick’s, and retired to Ireland to “die like a poisoned rat in a hole.”  His life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which finally overtook him, “The stage dark-ended,” said Scott, “ere the curtain fell.”  Insanity deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly ever a word.  He had directed that his tombstone should bear the inscription, Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit.  “So great a man he seems to me,” wrote Thackeray, “that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling.”  Swift’s first noteworthy publication was his Tale of a Tub, 1704, a satire on religious differences.  But his great work was Gulliver’s Travels, 1726, the book in which his hate and scorn of mankind, and the long rage of mortified pride and thwarted ambition found their fullest expression.  Children read the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, to the flying island of Laputa and the country of the Houyhnhnms, as they read Robinson Crusoe, as stories of wonderful adventure.  Swift had all of De Foe’s realism, his power of giving veri-similitude to his narrative by the invention of a vast number of small, exact, consistent details.  But underneath its fairy tales Gulliver’s Travels is a satire, far more radical than any of Dryden’s or Pope’s, because directed, not against particular parties or persons, but against human nature.  In his account of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, Swift tries to show that human greatness, goodness, beauty disappear if the scale be altered a little.  If men were six inches high instead of six feet, their wars, governments, science, religion—­all their institutions, in fine, and all the courage, wisdom, and virtue by which these have been built up, would appear laughable.  On the other hand, if they were sixty feet high instead of six, they would become disgusting.  The complexion of the finest ladies would show blotches, hairs, excrescences, and an overpowering effluvium would breathe from the pores of the skin.  Finally, in his loathsome caricature of mankind, as Yahoos, he contrasts them, to their shame, with the beasts, and sets instinct above reason.