nishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction,
hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy,
lust, malice, and ambition could produce."

His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate
the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with
the answers I had given; then, taking me into his hands, and
stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall
never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: "My little friend,
Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your
country; you have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice
are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws
are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose
interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding
them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which in
its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and
the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not
appear from all you have said, how any one perfection is required
toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less,
that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are
advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers for their conduct or
valor; judges for their integrity; senators for the love of their
country; or counsellors for their wisdom. * * * I cannot but
conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of
little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the
surface of the earth!"

In the voyage to Laputa the satire is directed against the vanity of
human wisdom, and the folly of abandoning useful occupations for the
empty schemes of visionaries. The philosophers of Laputa had allowed
their land to run to waste, and their people to fall into poverty in
their attempts to "soften marble for pillows and pin-cushions," to
"petrify the hoofs of a living horse to prevent them from foundering,"
to "sow land with chaff," and to "extract sunbeams from cucumbers,
which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm
the air in raw, inclement summers." The satire cannot be considered
too broad when we consider the folly and credulity which, at the time
of the South Sea mania, led many persons into sinking their whole
fortunes in such enterprises as the company "To