its care and use.  These three names stand for Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists; and the way in which the sons evade their father’s will and change the fashion of their garment is part of the bitter satire upon all religious sects.  Though it professes to defend the Anglican Church, that institution fares perhaps worse than the others; for nothing is left to her but a thin cloak of custom under which to hide her alleged hypocrisy.

In Gulliver’s Travels the satire grows more unbearable.  Strangely enough, this book, upon which Swift’s literary fame generally rests, was not written from any literary motive, but rather as an outlet for the author’s own bitterness against fate and human society.  It is still read with pleasure, as Robinson Crusoe is read, for the interesting adventures of the hero; and fortunately those who read it generally overlook its degrading influence and motive.

Gulliver’s Travels records the pretended four voyages of one Lemuel Gulliver, and his adventures in four astounding countries.  The first book tells of his voyage and shipwreck in Lilliput, where the inhabitants are about as tall as one’s thumb, and all their acts and motives are on the same dwarfish scale.  In the petty quarrels of these dwarfs we are supposed to see the littleness of humanity.  The statesmen who obtain place and favor by cutting monkey capers on the tight rope before their sovereign, and the two great parties, the Littleendians and Bigendians, who plunge the country into civil war over the momentous question of whether an egg should be broken on its big or on its little end, are satires on the politics of Swift’s own day and generation.  The style is simple and convincing; the surprising situations and adventures are as absorbing as those of Defoe’s masterpiece; and altogether it is the most interesting of Swift’s satires.

On the second voyage Gulliver is abandoned in Brobdingnag, where the inhabitants are giants, and everything is done upon an enormous scale.  The meanness of humanity seems all the more detestable in view of the greatness of these superior beings.  When Gulliver tells about his own people, their ambitions and wars and conquests, the giants can only wonder that such great venom could exist in such little insects.

In the third voyage Gulliver continues his adventures in Laputa, and this is a satire upon all the scientists and philosophers.  Laputa is a flying island, held up in the air by a loadstone; and all the professors of the famous academy at Lagado are of the same airy constitution.  The philosopher who worked eight years to extract sunshine from cucumbers is typical of Swift’s satiric treatment of all scientific problems.  It is in this voyage that we hear of the Struldbrugs, a ghastly race of men who are doomed to live upon earth after losing hope and the desire for life.  The picture is all the more terrible in view of the last years of Swift’s own life, in which he was compelled to live on, a burden to himself and his friends.