ysician, an
evidence, a suborner, an attorney, a traitor, or the like; this is
all according to the due course of things: but when I behold a lump
of deformity and diseases, both in body and mind, smitten with
pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience;
neither shall I ever be able to comprehend how such an animal, and
such a vice, could tally together.

In the "Voyage to Lilliput" the follies and vanities of individuals and
of parties are ridiculed by the representation of their practice among
diminutive beings. Sir Robert Walpole suffered in the person of Flimnap
the Lilliputian Premier, Tories and Whigs in the High-Heels and
Low-Heels, Catholics and Protestants in the Big-endians and
Small-endians. In the "Voyage to Brobdingnag," where Gulliver finds
himself a pigmy among giants, the general object of the satire is the
same, but its application becomes more bitter and universal.
Characteristics of the human race hardly perceptible in their ordinary
proportions, attain a disgusting and monstrous prominence when seen in
the huge persons of the Brobdingnagians. The king of this gigantic
people is represented as a beneficent monarch, who directs all his
energies toward the peace, prosperity, and material advancement of his
subjects; who seeks with a cold, calculating mind, undisturbed by
passion or prejudice, the greatest good of the greatest number. To this
monarch Gulliver gave a description of his native country: "I artfully
eluded many of his questions, and gave to every point a more favorable
turn, by many degrees, than the strictness of truth would allow; for I
have always borne that laudable partiality to my own country, which
Dionysius Halicarnasseusis, with so much justice, recommends to a
historian; I would hide the frailties and deformities of my political
mother, and place her virtues and beauties in the most advantageous
light." But the impression produced upon the King of Brobdingnag by
Gulliver's relation expressed the widespread sense of evil which
existed in Swift's day, which tinctured literature with misanthropy,
and made Rousseau at a later time argue the superiority of the savage
man over his civilized, but corrupt and hypocritical brother.

He was perfectly astonished with the historical account I gave him
of our affairs during the last century; protesting: "It was only a
heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions,
ba