in Ireland, who declared there were some things in Gulliver’s Travels he could not quite believe.  His difficulty probably occurred in the “Voyage to the Houyhnhnms.”  In the latter part of the work Swift allowed the fiction to yield to the exigencies of the satire.  So long as we can imagine the existence of giants and pigmies, it is easy to realize all the circumstances connected with Gulliver’s existence among them, but it is impossible to feel the same sense of reality in regard to horses who live in houses they could not build, and who eat oats they could not harvest.[154]

The general desire for reform is not more clearly to be seen in Acts of Parliament than in the works of Swift and Addison.  The earlier part of the century was marked by a strong realization of evil, and by a constantly growing inclination to suppress it.  The first condition is illustrated by the fierce satire of “Gulliver’s Travels,” the second by the earnest admonitions of the Spectator.  The two great authors make a striking contrast.  Swift, misanthropic, miserable, bitter; Addison, happy, loving mankind, admired alike by ally and opponent, Swift, dying mad; Addison, calm, conscious, employing his last moments to ask pardon of one he had offended.  The same contrast is in their works.  Swift dwelt and gloated on the evil about him, exposed it in more than its own deformity, and left his reader to reflect on his own degradation.  Addison, to whom that evil was almost equally apparent, but who turned from its contemplation with horror, exerted all his talents to correct it.  “The great and only end of these speculations,” he tells the reader of the Spectator, “is to banish vice and ignorance out of the territories of Great Britain.”

With solemn reproof and delicate raillery, Addison urged women to lay aside coarseness and folly, and preached against the licentiousness, swearing, gambling, duelling, and drunkenness of the men.  He attacked with both argument and ridicule the idea so prevalent since the Restoration, that vice was necessarily associated with pleasure and elegance, virtue with Puritanism and vulgarity.  To teach people to be witty without being indecent, gay without being vicious, such was the object of Addison.  As M. Taine says, he made morality fashionable.  To do this he exposed the folly and ugliness of vice.  But he did more.  He held up to the public view characters who exemplified his teachings, and were calculated to attract imitation.  In the creation and delineation of these characters he unconsciously began the English novel.

We should look in vain in the pages of Fielding, of Scott, or of George Eliot, for a more perfect sketch of character than that of Sir Roger de Coverley.  And the minor personages are little less delicately and naturally drawn.  There is the Bachelor of the Inner-Temple, “an excellent critick,” to whom “the time of the play is his hour of business”; Sir Andrew Freeport, the typical merchant;