GULLIVER’S TRAVELS.—­Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon’s mate, finds himself shipwrecked on the shore of the country of Lilliput, the people of which are only six inches in height.  His adventures are so vividly described that our charmed fancy places us among them as we read, and we, for a time, abandon ourselves to a belief in their reality.  It was, however, begun as a political satire; in the insignificance of the court of pigmies, he attacks the feebleness and folly of the new reign. Flimnap, the prime minister of Lilliput, is a caricature of Walpole; the Big Indians and Little Indians represent the Protestants and Roman Catholics; the High Heels and Low Heels stand for the Whigs and Tories; and the heir-apparent, who wears one heel high and the other low, is the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II., who favored both parties in order to gain both to his purpose.

In his second voyage, that to Brobdignag, his satirical imagination took a wider range—­European politics as they appear to a superior intelligence, illustrated by a man of sixty feet in comparison with one of six.  As Gulliver had looked with curious contempt upon the united efforts of the Lilliputians, he now found himself in great jeopardy and fear when in the hands of a giant of Brobdignag.  As the pigmy metropolis, five hundred yards square, was to London, so were London and other European capitals to the giants’ city, two thousand miles in circumference.  And what are the armies of Europe, when compared with that magnificent cavalry manoeuvring on a parade-ground twenty miles square, each mounted trooper ninety feet high, and all, as they draw their swords at command, representing ten thousand flashes of lightning?

The third part contains the voyage of Gulliver—­no less improbable than the former ones—­to Laputa, the flying island of projectors and visionaries.  This is a varied satire upon the Royal Society, the eccentricities of the savans, empirics of all kinds, mathematical magic, and the like.  In this, political schemes to restore the pretender are aimed at.  The Mississippi Scheme and the South Sea bubble are denounced.  Here, too, in his journey to Luggnagg, he introduces the sad and revolting picture of the Struldbrugs, those human beings who live on, losing all their power and becoming hideously old.

In his last voyage—­to the land of the Houyhnhnms—­his misanthropy is painfully manifest.  This is the country where horses are masters, and men a servile and degraded race; and he has painted the men so brutish and filthy that the satire loses its point.  The power of satire lies in contrast; we must compare the evil in men with the good:  when the whole race is included in one sweeping condemnation, and an inferior being exalted, in opposition to all possibility, the standard is absurd, and the satirist loses his pains.

The horses are the Houyhnhnms, (the name is an attempt to imitate a neigh,) a noble race, who are amazed and disgusted at the Yahoos,—­the degraded men,—­upon whom Swift, in his sweeping misanthropy, has exhausted his bitterness and his filth.