paid several protracted visits to London, where by the power
of his pen and his unrivalled genius as a satirist of the
politics of his time, he rapidly rose to a most formidable
position in the State,--the intimate of poets and of
statesmen. And yet, owing to the opposition which his claims
met with at court, he derived no higher preferment for himself
than the deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin, in 1713. In time
Swift reconciled himself to this change by vehemently
espousing the cause of the Irish against their English rulers,
and by his writings made himself as famous in that country as
he had formerly done in England. Gradually the gloom of
cerebral decay descended upon his magnificent intellect, and
he died October 19, 1745. "To think of his ruin," said
Thackeray, "is like thinking of the ruin of an empire." No
more original work of genius than Swift's "Gulliver's Travels"
exists in the English language. For sheer intellectual power
it may not be equal to the "Tale of a Tub," but as it has more
variety, so it has more art. "Gulliver" was published in 1726,
at a period when life's disappointments had ceased to worry
Swift. It is probable, however, that the book was planned some
years previously, the keenness of the satire on courts and
statesmen suggesting that his frustrated aims still rankled in
his mind. Curious is it that so perfect an artist should
nevertheless have missed the main purpose which he set himself
in this book, namely, "to vex the world rather than divert
it." The world refused to be vexed, and was hugely diverted.
The real greatness of "Gulliver" lies in its teeming
imagination and implacable logic. Swift succeeded in endowing
the wildest improbabilities with an air of veracity rivalling
Defoe himself. (See also Vol. X, p. 282.)

_I.--A Voyage to Lilliput_

My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire, but the charge of
maintaining me at Cambridge being too great, after three years there I
was bound apprentice to an eminent surgeon in London; in my spare time I
studied navigation, and mathematics, useful to those who travel, as I
always believed, at some time, it would be my fortune to do.

After studying physics in Leyden for two years, I became surgeon to the
Swallow, and made a voyage or two in the Levant. I then settled in
London, married, but