No man had a greater hatred of pretenders than Swift. On one occasion in Ireland, Lord Pembroke had brought over, for his chaplain, Dr. Mills, whose face was disfigured by an exceedingly large Roman nose. Mills was considerable of a pedant, and kept thrusting his learning upon Swift's notice, on every conceivable occasion, who took a most mortal dislike to him. On one occasion, when both were present, Pembroke, in order to prove to Swift that his chaplain was a genuine scholar, brought out a Virgil, requesting him to translate a passage, the one selected being the following: "Romanos rerum, dominos gentemque togatam." The chaplain immediately translated it correctly, thus, "the Roman rulers of affairs, and the toga'd nation." "There," said Swift, "I knew he could not do it. I construe it thus: Romanos, You've a Roman nose; Rerum, You're a rare rum; Dominos, Damn your nose; Gentemque togatam, And the whole race of chaplains ;" then dashed out of the room, leaving the two staring at each other in perfect astonishment. On another occasion, when he was dining with one of his neighbors, a farmer of limited means, the farmer, proud of the honor, made his wife deck herself out in the gayest of her apparel, entirely unsuited to her condition. When this lady was introduced to the dean, he saluted her with the same respect as if she had been a duchess, making several congés down to the ground, and then handed her with great formality to her seat. After some high-flown compliments, he addressed his host: "Mr. Reilly, I suppose you have a considerable estate here, let us go and look over your demesne." "Estate," says Reilly, "devil a foot of land belongs to me, or any of my generation. I have a pretty good lease here indeed from Fingal, but he threatens not to renew it." "Well, but when am I to see Mrs. Reilly?" "Why, don't you see her there before you?" "That Mrs. Reilly! impossible! I have heard she is a prudent woman, and as such would never dress herself in silks and other ornaments, fit only for ladies of fashion. No-Mrs. Reilly, the farmer's wife, would never wear any thing better than plain stuff, with other things suitable to it." Mrs. Reilly happened to be a woman of good sense, and taking the hint withdrew, changed her dress as speedily as possible,

and in a short time returned to the parlor in common apparel. Swift saluted her in the most friendly manner, taking her by the hand and saying: "I am heartily glad to see you, Mrs. Reilly. This husband of yours would just now have palmed off a fine lady upon me, dressed out in silks and in the pink of the mode, for his wife, but I was not to be taken in so."

The political satire embodied in his Gulliver's Travels is full of a delicate, quiet irony on men and things that, to be appreciated, must be fully understood. We read it as children, and the fascination of the story enchants us, ignorant as we then are, that beneath all these entertaining sketches of strange kingdoms, and stranger people, there lurks one of the most pungent political satires that perhaps was ever written. In maturer life we go back to it with a fuller knowledge, and we find it a perfect study, running over with rare learning, caustic irony, and most pertinent allusions to the political men of that period, and the affairs of which they formed a part. The voyage to Liliput was nothing more than a covert satire upon the policy of England's greatest minister, Walpole, and the ministry, during the reign of the First George. Lord Treasurer Flimnap was intended to portray Walpole, and all Swift's stinging irony is called into requisition, to cast ridicule upon the man he so bitterly despised. The struggles between the High Heels and the Low Heels are intended as a fling at the contests of the Whigs and Tories; while the controversies between the church parties are satirized in the ridiculous disputes between the Big Endians and Little Endians-men who either broke their eggs at the larger or the smaller end. The history of the origin of this terrible war, in which Liliput and Blefusca had been engaged for six-andthirty moons past, is thus told: "It began upon the following occasion: it is allowed on all hands that the primitive mode of breaking eggs before we eat them was upon the larger end; but his majesty's grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers, whereupon the emperor, his father, published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The

people so highly resented this law, that, our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefusca; and when they were quelled the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many large volumes have been published upon this controversy, but the books of the Big Endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding any employment."

This controversy over such trifles is intended to satirize the religious struggles between Catholics and Protestants, and the dispute as to the end of the egg which should be broken describes the controversy between the two churches respecting the sacraments. The kingdom of Blefusca represents France, and that of Liliput, England. The religious persecutions under Elizabeth and Mary, the intrigues of the Court of France to place Mary on the English throne and extirpate the Protestant religion, the support given to the Pretender, and the literature of the controversial theology between the jarring sects are all shadowed forth in this history of the wars between the Big Endians and Little Endians. In the incidents of the voyage to Laputa we have some exquisite satires upon philosophers in general, at all events upon pretenders to philosophy, who devoted themselves to vain and profitless speculations in science. The wry necks and the eye turned inward of the inhabitants, the flappers required to wait upon them to rouse them from their dreamy abstractions, the dishes of food served up to the Laputians cut into mathematical forms, the description of the beauty of their women, by means of rhombs, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and other geometrical terms; all these are happy and humorous satires upon the visionary and transcendental schemes, above the ordinary ken of humanity, originated by idealists and abstractionists. The visit to the Academy of Lagado, with its speculative philosophers, furnishes us with a most ludicrous satire upon the senseless extravagances and impracticable schemes with which the world has been full, and never more abounding than at this hour. How

irresistibly ludicrous, in his visit to the school of political projectors, is the suggestion of the doctor, who, believing that senates and great councils are often troubled with redundant and peccant humors, proposes that upon every meeting of the senate certain physicians should attend the three first days of the sitting, and at the close of each day's debate feel the pulses of the senators, and, after having consulted upon the nature of their maladies and methods of cure, should on the fourth day return to the senate house, attended by their apothecaries, to administer to each of them sanatives, aperients, corrosives, laxatives, &c. The project for harmonizing factions in a state is thus given by the same learned professor: "When parties in a state are violent, he offered a most wonderful contrivance to reconcile them. The method is this. You take a hundred leaders of each party; you dispose of them into couples of such whose heads are nearest of a size; then let two nice operators saw off the occiput of each couple at the same time, in such a manner that the brains may be equally divided. Let the occiputs thus cut off be interchanged, applying each to the head of the opposite party man. It seems, indeed, to be a work of some exactness, but the professor assured us that, if it were dextrously performed, the cure would be infallible. For he argued thus: that the two half brains, being left to debate the matter between themselves within the space of one skull, would soon come to a good understanding, and produce that moderation and regularity of thinking so much to be wished for in the heads of those who come into the world only to govern its motions."

The wild projectors in that Academy of Lagado, who had devices for plowing the ground with hogs, making silk out of cobwebs, softening marble for pillows and cushions, calcining ice into gunpowder, building houses from the roofs downward, extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, all have their imitators in our own day. The descriptions by Rabelais of the occupations of the courtiers of Quintessence, Queen of Eutlechie, as narrated by Pantagruel, when he visited "The Queendom of Whims," has more of coarseness than these sketches of Swift's wild designers in the Academy of Lagado; and the French author evidently lacks the keen perception of

the ridiculous and the familiarity with human nature manifested by Swift.

Swift's Letters of a Drapier are perhaps the finest specimens of political satire in the English language, and they secured for him as great an amount of popularity as was ever attained by any writer from a single production. These letters were written, under the assumed title of "The Drapier," to combat a patent that had been granted to one William Wood for coining half-pence for the use of Ireland. The granting of this patent produced a storm of public indignation, and Swift seized his terrible pen to annihilate Wood and his project. In one of these severe letters he says: "I am very sensible that such a work as I have undertaken might have worthily employed a much better pen, but when a house is attempted to be robbed it often happens that the weakest of the family runs first to the door. I am in the case of David, who could not move in the armor of Saul, and therefore he chose to attack the uncircumcised Philistine with the simple sling and stone. And I may, for Wood's honor as well as mine own, say, that he resembles Goliath in many circumstances applicable to our present purpose; for Goliath had an helmet of brass, and he was armed with a coat of mail, and the weight of his coat was five thousand shekels of brass, and he had greaves of brass on his legs, and a target of brass between his shoulders. In short, he was, like Mr. Wood, all over brass, and he defied the armies of the living God. Goliath's condition of combat were also precisely the same with those of Mr. Wood. If he prevail against us, then shall we be his ser

It is a great error to suppose that great satirists cannot be good and affectionate men. On the contrary, an honest satirist, from his instinctive hatred of vice and hypocrisy, generally avoids those sins and weaknesses he so mercilessly scourges. Nor does the indulgence in satiric writing and speaking interfere with the possession of a truly generous and affectionate disposition. In proportion to his intense hatred of vice, hypocrisy, and profligacy, is his admiration and love for qualities directly the opposite. So was it with Swift. His heart was truly good and affectionate. His acts of kind