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Roaring laughter, huge, rude, and somewhat vacant, as that of the Norse gods over their ale at Yule time; as if the face of the Sphinx were to wrinkle itself in laughter; or the fabulous Houyhnhnms themselves were there to mock in their peculiar fashion.
The satire of Traldragdubh made my blood boil as it was meant to do, but I hated Swift for the Houyhnhnms and never quite liked a horse afterwards.
The Houyhnhnms, beings endowed with reason, but undisturbed and untempted by the passions or struggles of earthly existence, are not brutes, and are not to be compared with men.
He made me observe, “that among the Houyhnhnms, the white, the sorrel, and the iron-gray, were not so exactly shaped as the bay, the dapple-gray, and the black; nor born with equal talents of mind, or a capacity to improve them; and therefore continued always in the condition of servants, without ever aspiring to match out of their own race, which in that country would be reckoned monstrous and unnatural.”
On Gulliver's return to England from the land of the Houyhnhnms, where, under the degraded form of Yahoos, he had studied mankind as they appeared when influenced by all human vices and brutal instincts unveiled by hypocrisy or civilization, he describes his horror at observing the existence of vanity among his countrymen who resembled Yahoos so closely;
When Gulliver has returned from his last voyage, with a mind which had dwelt on the beastliness and vice of the human race as it existed in the land of the Houyhnhnms, his warped judgment is unable to discern in his countrymen any attributes but those which they seem to share with the Yahoos:
The united praise of the whole race would be of less consequence to me, than the neighing of those two degenerate Houyhnhnms I keep in my stable; because from these, degenerate as they are, I still improve in some virtues without any mixture of vice. Do these miserable animals presume to think, that I am so degenerated as to defend my veracity?
"That's true, that's very true, my dear Maury. Fontaine, now, behind us in the ranks, his shoes are all worn out. Fontaine, eh? Fontaine knows more Greek than any man and he'll be good to Pluto. Pluto's almost worn out himself he's not immortal like Xanthius and Balius. Do you know, Maury, it's little wonder that Gulliver found the Houyhnhnms so detesting war?
After this it was perfectly quiet, and brought a measure of corn to the man-tamer, without showing the least disposition to strike with the feet or hit from the shoulder." That will do for the Houyhnhnms Gazette. Do you ever wonder why poets talk so much about flowers? Did you ever hear of a poet who did not talk about them?
But the Houyhnhnms train up their youth to strength, speed, and hardiness, by exercising them in running races up and down steep hills, and over hard stony grounds; and when they are all in a sweat, they are ordered to leap over head and ears into a pond or river.
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