n. He said
that his object in writing the satire was to vex the world, and he has
succeeded.

'It cannot be denied,' says Sir Walter Scott, one of the sanest and
healthiest of imaginative writers, 'that even a moral purpose will not
justify the nakedness with which Swift has sketched this horrible
outline of mankind degraded to a bestial state; since a moralist ought
to hold with the Romans that crimes of atrocity should be exposed when
punished, but those of flagitious impurity concealed. In point of
probability, too--for there are degrees of probability, proper even to
the wildest fiction--the fourth part of _Gulliver_ is inferior to the
three others.... The mind rejects, as utterly impossible, the
supposition of a nation of horses, placed in houses which they could not
build, fed with corn which they could neither sow, reap, nor save,
possessing cows which they could not milk, depositing that milk in
vessels which they could not make, and, in short, performing a hundred
purposes of rational and social life for which their external structure
altogether unfits them.'[46]

Neither morality, nor a regard for probability are so outraged in the
story of the Lilliputians and Brobdingnags.

Having once accepted Swift's assumption of the existence of little
people not six inches high, and of a country in which the inhabitants
'appeared as tall as an ordinary spire-steeple,' the exactness and
verisimilitude of the narrative, with its minute geographical details,
make it appear so reasonable that a young reader may feel inclined to
resent the criticism of an Irish bishop who said that 'the book was full
of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it.'
It is curious to note that Swift, who made a strange vow in early life
'not to be fond of children, or let them come near me hardly,' should
have done more to delight them than any author of his century, with the
exception, perhaps, of Defoe. Gay and Pope wrote a joint letter to Swift
on the appearance of the _Travels_, pretending that they did not know
the author, and advising him to get the book if it had not yet reached
Ireland. 'From the highest to the lowest,' they declare, 'it is
universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery.... It has
passed Lords and Commons _nemine contradicente_, and the whole town,
men, women, and children, are quite full of it.' A book which attained
in the author's lifetime a wellnigh unprecedented popularity shoul