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Updated: May 11, 2025
Then he went into his house and wrote the book that everybody likes, "Robinson Crusoe." "Gulliver's Travels" was written by an Irish clergyman named Jonathan Swift. He was a strange man. Some people said he was a genius, and some said he had always been a little insane. When he wrote, he often seemed to care for nothing but to say the most cutting, scornful things that he could.
Is it not strange that in the olden times so few poems or books or stories were written for children? The "Iliad," the stories of King Arthur, the "Canterbury Tales," and "Gulliver's Travels" and "Robinson Crusoe," were written for men and women. But happily this is the children's age, and now nearly half of all the books written are written for children.
"Poems to Stella" and "Trifles to Dr. Sheridan" fill up a great part of that period. But during this interval, Lord Orrery supposes, he employed his time in writing "Gulliver's Travels." His mind was likewise fully occupied by an affecting private incident.
I therefore regard Spoon River Anthology not as a brilliant revelation of human nature, but as a masterpiece of cynicism. It took a genius to write the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels; but after all, Yahoos are not men and women, and horses are not superior to humanity.
"Nothing," I faltered, rubbing my head. "Yes, you did," he said; "take that for telling a cram, and that for calling me names!" and suiting the action to the word he bestowed one cuff and one kick on my unoffending person, each of which I acknowledged by a howl. "Now then," said he, "what did you mean by borrowing Tom Groby's Gulliver's Travels yesterday when you knew I wanted to read it, eh?"
Gradually the gloom of cerebral decay descended upon his magnificent intellect, and he died October 19, 1745. "To think of his ruin," said Thackeray, "is like thinking of the ruin of an empire." No more original work of genius than Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" exists in the English language.
Swift's diseased eye had the microscopic quality of Gulliver's in Brobdingnag, and it was the loathsome obscenity which this revealed in the skin of things that tainted his imagination when it ventured on what was beneath. But with all Swift's scornful humor, he never made the pitiful mistake of his shallow friend Gay that life was a jest.
We prophesy nothing; but this we say: If any person had told the Parliament which met in perplexity and terror after the crash in 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams, that the annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they considered as an intolerable burden, that for one man of ten thousand pounds then living there would be five men of fifty thousand pounds, that London would be twice as large and twice as populous, and that nevertheless the rate of mortality would have diminished to one-half of what it then was, that the post-office would bring more into the exchequer than the excise and customs had brought in together under Charles the Second, that stage coaches would run from London to York in twenty-four hours, that men would be in the habit of sailing without wind, and would be beginning to ride without horses, our ancestors would have given as much credit to the prediction as they gave to Gulliver's Travels.
Foot to foot, each standing at the side of his boat, stood the brave men THEY WERE BOTH DEAD! "In the name of St. After this follows another episode. Two masked ladies quarrel at the door of a tavern overlooking the Thames: they turn out to be Stella and Vanessa, who have followed Swift thither; who is in the act of reading "Gulliver's Travels" to Gay, Arbuthnot, Bolingbroke, and Pope.
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."
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