The early part of the eighteenth century offered rich material to the satirist, and Swift brought to his work unparalleled fierceness and power.  He attacked the corruption of the politician and the minister, the vanity and vice of the courtier, the folly and extravagance of the fashionable world, and gathering venom in his course, made his satire universal and painted the pettiness and deformity of the human race.  But among the follies and vices of mankind, vanity was the fault most offensive to Swift, and that which he lashed with his most bitter invective.  To ridicule human pride, and to expose its inconsistency with the imperfection of man, is the ruling object of his great satirical romance.  On Gulliver’s return to England from the land of the Houyhnhnms, where, under the degraded form of Yahoos, he had studied mankind as they appeared when influenced by all human vices and brutal instincts unveiled by hypocrisy or civilization, he describes his horror at observing the existence of vanity among his countrymen who resembled Yahoos so closely;—­

My reconcilement to the Yahoo kind in general might not be so difficult, if they would be content with those vices and follies only which nature has entitled them to.  I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a gamester, a politician, a whoremonger, a physician, an evidence, a suborner, an attorney, a traitor, or the like; this is all according to the due course of things:  but when I behold a lump of deformity and diseases, both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience; neither shall I ever be able to comprehend how such an animal, and such a vice, could tally together.

In the “Voyage to Lilliput” the follies and vanities of individuals and of parties are ridiculed by the representation of their practice among diminutive beings.  Sir Robert Walpole suffered in the person of Flimnap the Lilliputian Premier, Tories and Whigs in the High-Heels and Low-Heels, Catholics and Protestants in the Big-endians and Small-endians.  In the “Voyage to Brobdingnag,” where Gulliver finds himself a pigmy among giants, the general object of the satire is the same, but its application becomes more bitter and universal.  Characteristics of the human race hardly perceptible in their ordinary proportions, attain a disgusting and monstrous prominence when seen in the huge persons of the Brobdingnagians.  The king of this gigantic people is represented as a beneficent monarch, who directs all his energies toward the peace, prosperity, and material advancement of his subjects; who seeks with a cold, calculating mind, undisturbed by passion or prejudice, the greatest good of the greatest number.  To this monarch Gulliver gave a description of his native country:  “I artfully eluded many of his questions, and gave to every point a more favorable turn, by many degrees, than the strictness of truth would allow;