his, political schemes to restore the pretender are
aimed at. The Mississippi Scheme and the South Sea bubble are denounced.
Here, too, in his journey to Luggnagg, he introduces the sad and revolting
picture of the Struldbrugs, those human beings who live on, losing all
their power and becoming hideously old.

In his last voyage--to the land of the _Houyhnhnms_--his misanthropy is
painfully manifest. This is the country where horses are masters, and men
a servile and degraded race; and he has painted the men so brutish and
filthy that the satire loses its point. The power of satire lies in
contrast; we must compare the evil in men with the good: when the whole
race is included in one sweeping condemnation, and an inferior being
exalted, in opposition to all possibility, the standard is absurd, and the
satirist loses his pains.

The horses are the _Houyhnhnms_, (the name is an attempt to imitate a
neigh,) a noble race, who are amazed and disgusted at the Yahoos,--the
degraded men,--upon whom Swift, in his sweeping misanthropy, has exhausted
his bitterness and his filth.

STELLA AND VANESSA.--While Swift's mysterious associations with Stella and
Vanessa have but little to do with the course of English Literature, they
largely affect his personality, and no sketch of him would be complete
without introducing them to the reader. We cannot conjure up the tall,
burly form, the heavy-browed, scowling, contemptuous face, the sharp blue
eye, and the bushy black hair of the dean, without seeing on one side and
the other the two pale, meek-eyed, devoted women, who watch his every
look, shrink from his sudden bursts of wrath, receive for their
infatuation a few fair words without sentiment, and earnestly crave a
little love as a return for their whole hearts. It is a wonderful,
touching, baffling story.

Stella he had known and taught in her young maidenhood at Sir William
Temple's. As has been said, she was called the daughter of his steward and
housekeeper, but conjectures are rife that she was Sir William's own
child. When Swift removed to Ireland, she came, at Swift's request, with a
matron friend, Mrs. Dingley, to live near him. Why he did not at once
marry her, and why, at last, he married her secretly, in 1716, are
questions over which curious readers have puzzled themselves in vain, and
upon which, in default of evidence, some perhaps uncharitable conclusions
have been reached. The story of their association may be fou