ained. Carteret, the Lord Lieutenant, afterwards
said, "When people ask me how I governed Ireland, I said that I pleased
Doctor Swift."

Thus far Swift's literary labors are manifest history: we come now to
consider that great work, _Gulliver's Travels_,--the most successful of
its kind ever written,--in which, with all the charm of fiction in plot,
incident, and description, he pictures the great men and the political
parties of the day.

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS.--Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon's mate, finds himself
shipwrecked on the shore of the country of Lilliput, the people of which
are only six inches in height. His adventures are so vividly described
that our charmed fancy places us among them as we read, and we, for a
time, abandon ourselves to a belief in their reality. It was, however,
begun as a political satire; in the insignificance of the court of
pigmies, he attacks the feebleness and folly of the new reign. _Flimnap_,
the prime minister of Lilliput, is a caricature of Walpole; the _Big
Indians_ and _Little Indians_ represent the Protestants and Roman
Catholics; the _High Heels_ and _Low Heels_ stand for the Whigs and
Tories; and the heir-apparent, who wears one heel high and the other low,
is the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II., who favored both parties in
order to gain both to his purpose.

In his second voyage, that to Brobdignag, his satirical imagination took a
wider range--European politics as they appear to a superior intelligence,
illustrated by a man of _sixty_ feet in comparison with one of _six_. As
Gulliver had looked with curious contempt upon the united efforts of the
Lilliputians, he now found himself in great jeopardy and fear when in the
hands of a giant of Brobdignag. As the pigmy metropolis, five hundred
yards square, was to London, so were London and other European capitals to
the giants' city, two thousand miles in circumference. And what are the
armies of Europe, when compared with that magnificent cavalry
manoeuvring on a parade-ground twenty miles square, each mounted
trooper ninety feet high, and all, as they draw their swords at command,
representing ten thousand flashes of lightning?

The third part contains the voyage of Gulliver--no less improbable than
the former ones--to _Laputa_, the flying island of projectors and
visionaries. This is a varied satire upon the Royal Society, the
eccentricities of the savans, empirics of all kinds, mathematical magic,
and the like. In t