Fish up Wrecks on the
Irish Coast," to "Make Salt-Water Fresh," to "Extract Silver from
Lead," and to "Import Jackasses from Spain."

It is impossible within the limits of this volume to comment with any
completeness on the application of Gulliver's Travels. The satire
gathered strength and bitterness in its progress, until the limits of
horror were reached in the voyage to the Houyhnhnms. This portion of
the work cannot be considered to apply universally. Man does not here
perceive a truthful reflection of himself. The Houyhnhnms, beings
endowed with reason, but undisturbed and untempted by the passions or
struggles of earthly existence, are not brutes, and are not to be
compared with men. The Yahoos, in their total depravity, are not human;
they represent, and that with a terrible truthfulness, the condition
into which men may fall when their animal instincts and baser passions
are allowed to subvert their reason and their noble qualities. The more
a man suffers his better nature to yield to his lower, the more he
resembles the detestable Yahoo. In this sense alone, the satire applies
generally to mankind; but it applies with peculiar point to some
characteristics of Swift's time. In reading the following passage, it
is impossible not to be reminded of the treatment of Sir Robert Walpole
by his former flatterers and sycophants when his power seemed at an
end:

Some curious _Houyhnhnms_ observe that in most herds there was a
sort of ruling _Yahoo_, * * * who was always more deformed in body
and mischievous in disposition than any of the rest; that this
leader had usually a favorite as like himself as he could get,
whose employment was to lick his master's feet * * * and drive the
female Yahoos to his kennel; for which he was now and then rewarded
with a piece of ass's flesh. This favorite is hated by the whole
herd, and, therefore, to protect himself, keeps always near the
person of his leader. He usually continues in office till a worse
can be found; but the very moment he is discarded, his successor,
at the head of all the _Yahoos_ in that district, young and old,
male and female, come in a body, and * * * (defile) him from head
to foot.

But Swift, in his denunciation of men under the form of the Yahoos,
disclosed the narrowness of his own misanthropy. When Gulliver has
returned from his last voyage, with a mind which had dwelt on the
beastliness and vice of th