preference on the most terrible examples of human depravity, and he gave permanent form, in his literary productions, to ideas from which a healthy mind must always turn with horror and disgust.  His misanthropy was founded partly on observation of the evil and corruption which he saw about him, and partly on the suspicions and exaggerations of his own imagination.  He gave up writing a history of England, because, in his own words, he found the characters of history such a pack of rascals that he would have no more to say to them.  He made a “List of Friends,” which he classified as Grateful, Ungrateful, Indifferent, and Doubtful.  Of these friends, forty-four in number, only seventeen were marked with the g which signified that their friendship was trusted.  We cannot disassociate Swift from his own time, nor can we attribute simply to a melancholy life or to mental aberration the revolting conceptions which his works contain.  The coarseness and corruption which marked the private and public life of Swift’s day had their share in the production of such poems as The “Lady’s Dressing-Room,” and such degrading views of human nature as are expressed in the “Voyage to the Houyhnhnms.”

It is a significant sign of the times that Hogarth, the greatest English painter, and Swift, the greatest English writer, should have employed their talents in caricature and in satire.  In the wonderful allegory of the “Tale of a Tub,” in which the corruptions and failings of the English, Roman, and Presbyterian churches were ridiculed in the persons of Jack, Peter, and Martin, Swift displayed at an early age his exuberant wit and surpassing satirical power.  The “Tale of a Tub” was succeeded by the “Battle of the Books,” an imaginary conflict between volumes in a library, which exposed the absurdity of the controversy over the relative merits of the ancients and the moderns.  But Swift’s satire became most fierce and brilliant when it was turned from rival creeds and rival literatures, and directed toward mankind itself.

The “Travels of Lemuel Gulliver” were dropped, said the publisher, at his house, in the dark, from a hackney-coach.  In regard to this work, the Dean followed his custom of sending out his writings to the world to make their way on their own merits, without the assistance of his name.  But the authorship of the book could not long remain unknown before the storm of applause and curiosity which it immediately excited.  It was a production, said Johnson,[152] “so new and strange that it filled the reader with a mingled emotion of merriment and amazement.  It was received with such avidity, that the price of the first edition was raised before the second could be made; it was read by the high and the low, the learned and illiterate.  Criticism was for a while lost in wonder; no rules of judgment were applied to a book written in open defiance of truth and regularity.”  Whether read for the satire or the story, the adventures of Gulliver proved equally fascinating.  They “offered personal and political satire to the readers in high life, low and coarse incidents to the vulgar, marvels to the romantic, wit to the young and lively, lessons of morality and policy to the grave, and maxims of deep and bitter misanthropy to neglected age and disappointed ambition."[153]