of the plot, and when immaterial details are introduced,
the reader is likely to be impressed with their truth. In this way the
personality of Gulliver is kept up, and he remains, through whatever
strange scenes he passes, the same honest, blunt English sailor.

Yet more remarkable is the skill of the author in maintaining the
probability of the allegory. When living among the Lilliputians,
Gulliver insensibly adopts their ideas of size. He admires as much as
they the prowess of the horseman who clears his shoe at a single leap.
When the committee of the Lilliputian king examine Gulliver's pockets,
they describe his handkerchief as a "great piece of coarse cloth, large
enough to be a foot-cloth to your majesty's chief room of state"; his
purse is "a net, almost large enough for a fisherman," containing
"several massy pieces of yellow metal, which, if they be real gold,
must be of immense value." The same almost mathematical accuracy of
proportion is kept up in the visit to Brobdingnag, and on Gulliver's
return to his native country he experiences as much trouble in
reaccustoming his mind to the ordinary standard as he had met with in
adopting that of pigmies or giants. There was a country clergyman
living in Ireland, who declared there were some things in Gulliver's
Travels he could not quite believe. His difficulty probably occurred in
the "Voyage to the Houyhnhnms." In the latter part of the work Swift
allowed the fiction to yield to the exigencies of the satire. So long
as we can imagine the existence of giants and pigmies, it is easy to
realize all the circumstances connected with Gulliver's existence among
them, but it is impossible to feel the same sense of reality in regard
to horses who live in houses they could not build, and who eat oats
they could not harvest.[154]

The general desire for reform is not more clearly to be seen in Acts of
Parliament than in the works of Swift and Addison. The earlier part of
the century was marked by a strong realization of evil, and by a
constantly growing inclination to suppress it. The first condition is
illustrated by the fierce satire of "Gulliver's Travels," the second
by the earnest admonitions of the _Spectator_. The two great authors
make a striking contrast. Swift, misanthropic, miserable, bitter;
Addison, happy, loving mankind, admired alike by ally and opponent,
Swift, dying mad; Addison, calm, conscious, employing his last moments
to ask pardon of one he had offe