tianity had not been at hand to provide them with materials?
What other subject through all Art and Nature could have produced
Tindal for a profound author, and furnished him with readers? It is
the wise choice of the subject, which alone adorns and
distinguishes the writer. For had a hundred such pens as these been
employed on the side of religion, they would have sunk into silence
and oblivion."

Pope claims to have shadowed forth such a work as Gulliver's Travels in
the Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus; but Swift, no doubt, took the idea
from Lucian's "True History." He was also indebted to Philostratus, who
speaks of an army of pigmies attacking Hercules. Something may also have
been gathered from Defoe's minuteness of detail; and he made use of all
these with a master-hand to improve and increase the fertile resources
of his own mind. Swift produced the work, by which he will always
survive, and be young. In the voyage to Lilliput he depreciates the
court and ministers of George I., by comparing them to something
insignificantly small: in the voyage to Brobdingnag by likening them to
something grand and noble. But the immortality of the work owes nothing
to such considerations but everything to humour and fancy, especially to
the general satire upon human vanity. "The Emperor of Lilliput is taller
by almost the breadth of my nail than any of his Court, which alone is
enough to strike awe into beholders."

In the Honyhuhums, the human race is compared to the Yahoos, and placed
in a loathsome and ridiculous light. They are represented as most
irrational creatures, frequently engaged in wars or acrimonious disputes
as to whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh, whether it be better to
kiss a post or throw it into the fire, and what is the best colour of a
coat!--referring to religious disputes between Catholics and
Protestants. He says, that among the Yahoos, "It is a very justifiable
cause of war to invade the country after the people have been wasted by
famine, destroyed by pestilence, or embroiled by factions among
themselves." With regard to internal matters, "there is a society of men
among us, bred up from youth in the art of proving by words multiplied
for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as
they are paid. In this society all the rest of the people are slaves."

Swift's humour, as has been already intimated, by no means confined
itself to being a mere