the Dean of St. Patrick’s vented itself within the limits of this ingenious device by mocking and humiliating men in all the attitudes and occupations of their lives. Never has an indictment of the cowardice, the weakness, and the foolishness of humanity been fiercer or more complete than that contained in this book for children. Those who believe that pessimism had its rise in Germany in the nineteenth century are blind or forgetful. The most definitive condemnation of life as we live it was uttered in England in the year 1721. Even before Swift’s time many of the things whereof men boast, wherein they glory, had been reproached and bitterly attacked. There had been elegiac laments and sarcastic demolitions. But no one had extended such treatment to the whole human race, no one had said these things with such force, with such refined cruelty. Dr. Gulliver, surgeon and average man, seeks in appearance to maintain the dignity and the greatness of his species, and yet the most terrific accusations emerge from his apologetic efforts.
Lemuel Gulliver is honest, intelligent, educated, good-looking; he can reason, he is a man of feeling; and yet his invisible enemy condemns him to be a toy in the hands of giants, and to resemble the disgusting Yahoos, slaves of the wise horses. After we have seen our foolish littleness reflected in the Lilliputians, he reveals
