am writing, it is five years since my last return to England:  during the first year, I could not endure my wife or children in my presence; the very smell of them was intolerable, much less could I suffer them to eat in the same room.  To this hour they dare not presume to touch my bread, or drink out of the same cup; neither was I ever able to let one of them take me by the hand.

Thus Swift himself, from the vividness with which he realized, and the intensity with which he hated, the vices and failings of humanity, was unable to duly appreciate the good, which, in some measure, always accompanies the evil.

It was the habit of the great Dean to utter the witticisms which caused the continual delight or terror of all who approached him with the most stern composure.  Such was the manner of the “Travels.”  The solemn and circumstantial narrative style, imitated from the old English explorers added verisimilitude to the incidents and point to the sarcasm.  Trifles, personal to the traveller and of no consequence to the course of the story, gave an appearance of truth to the whole work.  Thus Gulliver keeps the reader informed of the most minute details interesting to himself.  “I took part of a small house in the Old Jewry; and being advised to alter my condition, I married Mrs. Mary Burton, second daughter to Mr. Edmund Burton, hosier, in Newgate Street, with whom I received four hundred pounds for a portion.”  In the same way he informs us carefully that the date of his sailing on the first voyage was May 4, 1699, from Bristol, and the storm which destroyed the ship arose when in the latitude of 30 degrees 2 minutes south.  In a work of fiction only such events are expected as have a direct bearing upon the development of the plot, and when immaterial details are introduced, the reader is likely to be impressed with their truth.  In this way the personality of Gulliver is kept up, and he remains, through whatever strange scenes he passes, the same honest, blunt English sailor.

Yet more remarkable is the skill of the author in maintaining the probability of the allegory.  When living among the Lilliputians, Gulliver insensibly adopts their ideas of size.  He admires as much as they the prowess of the horseman who clears his shoe at a single leap.  When the committee of the Lilliputian king examine Gulliver’s pockets, they describe his handkerchief as a “great piece of coarse cloth, large enough to be a foot-cloth to your majesty’s chief room of state”; his purse is “a net, almost large enough for a fisherman,” containing “several massy pieces of yellow metal, which, if they be real gold, must be of immense value.”  The same almost mathematical accuracy of proportion is kept up in the visit to Brobdingnag, and on Gulliver’s return to his native country he experiences as much trouble in reaccustoming his mind to the ordinary standard as he had met with in adopting that of pigmies or giants.  There was a country clergyman living