to make their way on their own merits, without the assistance of his
name. But the authorship of the book could not long remain unknown
before the storm of applause and curiosity which it immediately
excited. It was a production, said Johnson,[152] "so new and strange
that it filled the reader with a mingled emotion of merriment and
amazement. It was received with such avidity, that the price of the
first edition was raised before the second could be made; it was read
by the high and the low, the learned and illiterate. Criticism was for
a while lost in wonder; no rules of judgment were applied to a book
written in open defiance of truth and regularity." Whether read for the
satire or the story, the adventures of Gulliver proved equally
fascinating. They "offered personal and political satire to the readers
in high life, low and coarse incidents to the vulgar, marvels to the
romantic, wit to the young and lively, lessons of morality and policy
to the grave, and maxims of deep and bitter misanthropy to neglected
age and disappointed ambition."[153]

The early part of the eighteenth century offered rich material to the
satirist, and Swift brought to his work unparalleled fierceness and
power. He attacked the corruption of the politician and the minister,
the vanity and vice of the courtier, the folly and extravagance of the
fashionable world, and gathering venom in his course, made his satire
universal and painted the pettiness and deformity of the human race.
But among the follies and vices of mankind, vanity was the fault most
offensive to Swift, and that which he lashed with his most bitter
invective. To ridicule human pride, and to expose its inconsistency
with the imperfection of man, is the ruling object of his great
satirical romance. On Gulliver's return to England from the land of the
Houyhnhnms, where, under the degraded form of Yahoos, he had studied
mankind as they appeared when influenced by all human vices and brutal
instincts unveiled by hypocrisy or civilization, he describes his
horror at observing the existence of vanity among his countrymen who
resembled Yahoos so closely;--

My reconcilement to the Yahoo kind in general might not be so
difficult, if they would be content with those vices and follies
only which nature has entitled them to. I am not in the least
provoked at the sight of a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool,
a lord, a gamester, a politician, a whoremonger, a ph