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Let not the balance of your understanding be so upset by ephemeral childishness as to fancy that it matters much whether you break an egg top or bottom, because Gulliver's two nations went to war about it; or that it matters much whether your queen is called queen of India or empress, because two parties made a noise about it, and the country has wasted ten thousand square miles of good paper on the subject, trivial as the dust on a butterfly's wing.
His opinion of human nature was Gulliver's; but he did not regard human nature with Gulliver's horror. He thought that he and his fellow-creatures were Yahoos; and he thought a Yahoo a very agreeable kind of animal. No princes were ever more social than Charles and Philip of Orleans: yet no princes ever had less capacity for friendship.
As for the prophets we know what appears to have been the opinion formed concerning them by those who should have been best acquainted with them; I am no judge as to the merits of the controversy between them and their fellow-countrymen, but I have read their works and am of opinion that they will not hold their own against such masterpieces of modern literature as, we will say, The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels or Tom Jones.
"Why-ee!" says I. "How you talk!" says I. "Have you ever read the Bible?" He said "He had, his grandmother owned one. And he had seen it in early youth." And then he went on, sort o' apologizin', "He had always meant to read it through. But he had entered political life at an early age, and he believed he had never read any more of it, only portions of Gulliver's Travels.
We listened with glowing cheeks to Robinson Crusoe and the Arabian Nights, Gulliver's Travels and Don Quixote, both arranged for children, the pretty, stories of Nieritz and others, descriptions of Nature and travel, and Grimm's fairy tales. On other winter evenings my mother this will surprise many in the case of so sensible a woman took us to the theatre.
Why is Gulliver's Travels so popular? What are the most important lessons which a young writer may learn from Swift? In what is he specially lacking? Addison and Steele. From the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers the student should not fail to read Spectator No. 112, A Country Sunday.
As a writer he is our greatest master of grave irony, and while he presents the most humorous ideas, the severity of his own countenance never relaxes. The Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels are the greatest satires in the English language, although the concluding part of the latter is a savage and almost insane attack upon the whole human race.
About thirty years before Gulliver's Travels appeared Addison wrote these lines: "Jamque acies inter medias sese arduus infert Pygmeadum ductor, qui, majestate verendus, Incessuque gravis, reliquos supereminet omnes Mole gigantea, mediamque exsurgit in ulnam."
A man pulls himself up suddenly, to find that he has been vulgar. If so here, so be it! I refuse to plead to the indictment; sentence me and be hanged to you! I am by nature a vulgar fellow. I prefer "Tom Jones" to "The Rosary," Rabelais to the Elsie books, the Old Testament to the New, the expurgated parts of "Gulliver's Travels" to those that are left.
For a long time it was supposed that Mars had no moons, and when Dean Swift wrote 'Gulliver's Travels' he wanted to make the Laputans do something very clever, so he described their discovery of two moons attending Mars, and to make it quite absurd he said that when they observed these moons they found that one of them went round the planet in about ten hours.
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