morals, valor, knowledge, thought, history, civilization. It remains only for the poor Yahoos, naked and unmasked, to reveal us at the last as we really are: mere apes, wild, stupid, evil. Thus ends this marvelous and grievous outburst of as unprejudiced a spirit as ever lived and suffered in this world.
Swift is not only a simple, clear, and clean-cut writer: he is original. Macaulay himself, though he points out a resemblance between a passage in one of Addison’s Latin poems and a passage in the voyage to Lilliput, recognizes that Swift owes exceptionally little to his predecessors. There are stories of giants and pygmies in popular mythology, to be sure; but the idea of making use of these differences of stature to proclaim and represent the tragi-comedy of human life was Swift’s own. There had been earlier accounts of imaginary voyages to strange lands; but no author had succeeded, as Swift was to do, in fusing intense satire with amusing narrative. Before the time of Swift there had been Utopias wherein more perfect men had framed wise regulations for their common life; but in Gulliver’s Travels, after the voyage to Lilliput, there is scarcely a trace of the “cities of the sun.” The one perfect society is that of the illiterate horses: a bitter mockery of our pride as literary bipeds.
Yet human vanity, never content, has sought
