It is impossible within the limits of this volume to comment with any completeness on the application of Gulliver’s Travels.  The satire gathered strength and bitterness in its progress, until the limits of horror were reached in the voyage to the Houyhnhnms.  This portion of the work cannot be considered to apply universally.  Man does not here perceive a truthful reflection of himself.  The Houyhnhnms, beings endowed with reason, but undisturbed and untempted by the passions or struggles of earthly existence, are not brutes, and are not to be compared with men.  The Yahoos, in their total depravity, are not human; they represent, and that with a terrible truthfulness, the condition into which men may fall when their animal instincts and baser passions are allowed to subvert their reason and their noble qualities.  The more a man suffers his better nature to yield to his lower, the more he resembles the detestable Yahoo.  In this sense alone, the satire applies generally to mankind; but it applies with peculiar point to some characteristics of Swift’s time.  In reading the following passage, it is impossible not to be reminded of the treatment of Sir Robert Walpole by his former flatterers and sycophants when his power seemed at an end: 

Some curious Houyhnhnms observe that in most herds there was a sort of ruling Yahoo, * * * who was always more deformed in body and mischievous in disposition than any of the rest; that this leader had usually a favorite as like himself as he could get, whose employment was to lick his master’s feet * * * and drive the female Yahoos to his kennel; for which he was now and then rewarded with a piece of ass’s flesh.  This favorite is hated by the whole herd, and, therefore, to protect himself, keeps always near the person of his leader.  He usually continues in office till a worse can be found; but the very moment he is discarded, his successor, at the head of all the Yahoos in that district, young and old, male and female, come in a body, and * * * (defile) him from head to foot.

But Swift, in his denunciation of men under the form of the Yahoos, disclosed the narrowness of his own misanthropy.  When Gulliver has returned from his last voyage, with a mind which had dwelt on the beastliness and vice of the human race as it existed in the land of the Houyhnhnms, his warped judgment is unable to discern in his countrymen any attributes but those which they seem to share with the Yahoos:—­

My wife and family received me with great surprise and joy, because they concluded me certainly dead; but I must freely confess the sight of them filled me only with hatred, disgust, and contempt; and the more, by reflecting on the near alliance I had to them. * * * As soon as I entered the house, my wife took me in her arms and kissed me; at which, having not been used to the touch of that odious animal for so many years, I fell into a swoon for almost an hour.  At the time I