political circles with admiration and curiosity. The book was read everywhere and by everybody, "from the highest to the lowest, from the cabinet council to the nursery." In every coterie the authorship was discussed, and though a few of Swift's intimate literary friends were acquainted with the secret, they did not divulge it. A more extraordinary satirical romance the world had never seen. Eccentric, original, vivid, and picturesque, it possesses the charms of a fairy tale or romance, and is written with a skill that cheats one at times, despite its many extravagances, into a belief of its reality. What keen political satire is concealed beneath the fiction! what wit, irony, and ridicule are launched against the men and things of his day through the fabled beings of the tale! "No word," says Sir Walter Scott, "drops from Gulliver's pen in vain. Where his work ceases for a moment to satirise the vices of mankind in general, it becomes a stricture upon the parties, politics, and courts of Britain; where it abandons that subject of censure, it presents a lively picture of the vices and follies of the fashionable world, or of the vain pursuits of philosophy; while the parts of the narrative which refer to the traveller's own adventures form a humorous and striking parody of the manners of old voyagers, their dry and minute style, and the unimportant personal incidents with which their journals are encumbered."

The object of Swift's work is moral and political: through the vehicle of a romantic fiction to exhibit to mankind-viewed, as it were, apart from themselves -their vices, their follies, their meannesses, their political errors, and social faults. "When human actions," Dr. Hawkesworth justly observes, "are ascribed to pigmies and giants, there are few that do not excite either contempt, disgust, or horror; to ascribe them, therefore, to such beings was, perhaps, the most probable method of engaging the mind to examine them with attention and judge of them with impartiality, by suspending the fascination of habit, and exhibiting familiar objects in a new light. Personal strength and beauty, the wisdom and virtue of mankind, become objects, not of pride, but of humility, in the diminutive stature and contemptible weakness of the Lilliputians, in the horrid deformity of the Brobdignagians, in the learned folly of the Laputans, and in the parallel drawn between our manners and those of the Houyhnhnms." We agree with Mr. Thackeray that there is no one who reads it but must admire the humour and conduct of this famous work; we are charmed with the adventures even before we think of their political significance; we wonder at the fine humour, the fierce and trenchant wit, the scathing satire, and the savage invective; and we feel that none but a master-mind could conceive, or a master-hand execute allegories so lengthened and yet so well sustained, so uncommon and yet with so little that is inconsistent. The instinct of Swift, like that of De Foe and of Bunyan, taught him that in the simple, blunt character of his seafaring surgeon lay his safety and his success, The frank, straightforward GULLIVER, like CRUSOE and CHRISTIAN, is ever the same through trial and adventure; they all have become realities to our mindknown once, they are known for ever.

THE AUTHOR GIVES SOME ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF AND FAMILY; HIS FIRST INDUCEMENTS TO TRAVEL. HE IS SHIPWRECKED, AND SWIMS FOR HIS LIFE; GETS SAFE ON SHORE IN THE COUNTRY OF LILLIPUT; IS MADE A PRISONER, AND CARRIED UP THE COUNTRY.

four years; and

money,

Y father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons. He sent me to Emanuel College in Cambridge, at fourteen years old, where I resided three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon in London, with whom I continued

my father now and then sending me small sums of I laid them out in learning navigation, and other parts of the

The "Voyage to Lilliput," the First Part of the Travels, is founded upon the ancient fiction of the "Pigmies," known to all classical scholars, and familiar to children in their

mathematics, useful to those who intend to travel, as I always believed it would be, some time or other, my fortune to do. When I left Mr. Bates, I went down to my father; where, by the assistance of him and my uncle John, and some other relations, I got forty pounds, and a promise of thirty pounds a year to maintain me at Leyden; there I studied physic two years and seven months, knowing it would be useful in long voyages.

Soon after my return from Leyden, I was recommended by my good master, Mr. Bates, to be surgeon to the Swallow, Captain Abraham Pannell, commander, with whom I continued three years and a half, making a voyage or two into the Levant, and some other parts.* When I came back I resolved to settle in London; to which Mr. Bates, my master, encouraged me, and by him I was recommended to several patients. 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.

But my good master Bates dying in two years after, and I having few friends, my business began to fail; for my conscience would not suffer me to imitate the bad practice of too many among my brethren. Having therefore consulted with my wife, and some of my acquaintance, I determined to go again to sea. I was surgeon successively in two ships, and made several voyages, for six years, to the East and West Indies, by which I got some addition to my fortune. My hours

modern representatives-the "fairies." The object of the satire is to assail the policy of Walpole and the Ministry of George I., with which Swift was then deeply dissatisfied, especially on account of the impeachment of Oxford and Bolingbroke, the flight of the latter to France, and the banishment of Atterbury, who retired to the same country. Against the Minister, accordingly, the keenest shafts of Swift's irony and stinging wit are directed, under the character of Lord Treasurer Flimnap. The struggles between the Tories and the Whigs are described under the contemptuous epithets of "High-heels" and "Low-heels;" while the religious controversies between the two great Church parties are ridiculed as being of no greater importance than the dispute between the "Big Endians" and the "Little Endians." In Blefuscu, we have France symbolised, as Lilliput is designed to typify England; and the flight of Gulliver to the former is intended to reprobate the treatment of Bolingbroke and Atterbury. Independently of these political allusions, the tale is highly amusing, the incidents happily conceived, and the adventures wonderfully captivating.

How

The wonderful skill of Swift is shown in this opening. Gulliver gives a brief notice of himself in a manner so simple and so natural, that the reader is, at the very outset, impressed with a feeling of the reality of the narrative, and thus prepared to believe the narrator. admirable is the mention, as it were casually, of such minute circumstances as that he was two years and seven months studying physic; that he took part of a house in the Old Jewry, and got £400 fortune with his wife.

of leisure I spent in reading the best authors, ancient and modern, being always provided with a good number of books; and when I was ashore, in observing the manners and dispositions of the people, as well as learning their language; wherein I had a great facility, by the strength of my memory.

The last of these voyages not proving very fortunate, I grew weary of the sea, and intended to stay at home with my wife and family. I removed from the Old Jewry to Fetter Lane, and from thence to Wapping, hoping to get business among the sailors, but it would not turn to account. After three years' expectation that things would mend, I accepted an advantageous offer from Captain William Prichard, master of the Antelope, who was making a voyage to the South Seas. We set sail from Bristol, May 4, 1699, and our voyage at first was very prosperous.

It would not be proper, for some reasons, to trouble the reader with the particulars of our adventures in those seas; let it suffice to inform him, that in our passage from thence to the East Indies, we were driven by a violent storm to the north-west of Van Dieman's Land.* By an observation, we found ourselves in the latitude of 30 degrees 2 minutes south. Twelve of our crew were dead by immoderate labour and ill food; the rest were in a very weak condition. On the 5th of November, which was the beginning of summer in those parts, the weather being very hazy, the seaman spied a rock within half a cable's length of the ship; but the wind was so strong, that we were driven directly upon it, and split. Six of the crew, of whom I was one, having let down the boat into the sea, made a shift to get clear of the ship and the rock. We rowed, by my computation, about three leagues, till we were able to work no longer, being already spent with labour while we were in the ship. We therefore trusted ourselves to the mercy of the waves, and in about half an hour the boat was overset by a sudden flurry from the north. What became of my companions in the boat, as well of those who escaped on the rock, or were left in the vessel, I cannot tell; but conclude they were all lost.

For

It will be remembered how little was known of the South Pacific Ocean, or the Australian Continent, at the time when Swift wrote. The discoverer of Van Dieman's Land, in 1633— Abel Janson Tasman-gave but a very inaccurate account of the seas he traversed, and so Swift had sea room enough in which to place his ideal country of Lilliput. Fortunately, while he states the latitude of the shipwreck, he avoids giving the longitude, and so we have escaped the possibility of finding the scene of his adventures amongst the pigmies upon the coast of Western Australia.