The terrible earnestness of Swift's wrath, the saeva indignatio of his own epitaph, gives him a peculiar power. Lighter satire amuses us; we enjoy the wit and discernment of the writer, and join in his pleasant half-malicious laugh. But Swift's satire goes home to us; we feel that he sees into the realities of things, and that the shams and canting impostures he exposes are real and hateful things which still destroy the honesty and truth of life. With Swift as with Carlyle the detestation of falsehood and hypocrisy was the one ruling idea, and the vehemence with which they denounced the pettinesses and shams of life carries us away. It is difficult to turn from either of these earnest haters of wrong and falsehood to the half-hearted criticisms of the generality, without a feeling of contempt. I remember, when I had read Sartor Resartus for the first time, taking up a volume of essays by a very distinguished critic of these days, whom I had frequently read with keen pleasure; and flinging it incontinently away. The bathos was too precipitate. It is the same with Swift. He towers above other men by the scathing force and passion of his indignation, by the terrible, perhaps exaggerated, earnestness which underlies his lightest travesties.

His earnestness is reflected in his style. No English is so pointed and so direct as Swift's. Every sentence is a keen knife that cuts straight to the core; there is no hesitation or swerving; there is never a word wasted. His sentences follow one another logically and equably, in the order dictated by the subject, without any apparent regard for the graces of expression, nor even, sometimes, for the ordinary rules of gram

mar.

He wrote rapidly, as the thoughts seized him,

nor "ever leaned his head upon his left hand to study what he should write next." Yet Swift's prose is never ungainly; it is simple and clear and direct, absolutely free from affectation or "curious care," never seeking mere rhetorical effects; but it is not the less polished to a smooth and brilliant surface ;-not the polish of elaboration, but the fine chiselled surface that marks a mind that thought clearly and exactly. If, as Mr. Matthew Arnold says, "6 uniformity, regularity, precision, balance," be the best names for the essentials of good prose, these qualities are conspicuous in Swift's English. But precision is the quality that strikes one as more salient in his style than perhaps in any other English prose. His words always say precisely what he means, neither more nor less; and that after all is the end of language with one who has something to say. If he can say exactly what he means, without rhetorical exaggeration or bald insufficiency, he writes well; if he can do all this, and also make his sentences glitter like burnished daggers, he is a master of prose style. In all this Swift stands supreme: there is more graceful language, more glowing, more imaginative, but none more masculine, straightforward, and expressive of the precise idea of the writer. A safer model of style cannot be found in the whole range of English literature.

But there is another quality in Swift as characteristic as his incisive style or his cynical satire, and this is his extraordinary power of detailed realization of purely fictitious images. It is this that gives, not only his narrative, but his illustrations, his "proposals," and "schemes," their lifelike probability. As Mr. Leslie Stephen has put it, "Swift's peculiarity is in the

curious sobriety of fancy which leads him to keep in his most daring flights upon the confines of the possible. In the imaginary travels of Lucian and Rabelais, with which Gulliver is generally compared, we frankly take leave of the real world altogether. We are treated with arbitrary and monstrous combinations, which may be amusing, but which do not challenge even a semblance of belief. In Gulliver this is so little the case that it can hardly be said in strictness that the fundamental assumptions are even impossible. Why should there not be creatures in human form with whom, as in Lilliput, one of our inches represents a foot, or, as in Brobdingnag, one of our feet represents an inch? the assumption is so modest that we are presented, it may be said, with a definite and soluble problem. We have not, as in other fictitious worlds, to deal with a state of things in which the imagination is bewildered, but with one in which it is agreeably stimulated. We have certainly to consider an extremely exceptional case, but one to which all the ordinary laws of human nature are still strictly applicable. Imagine giants and dwarfs as tall as a house or as low as a footstool, and let us see what comes of it. That is a plain, almost mathematical problem; and we can therefore judge his success and receive pleasure from the ingenuity and verisimilitude of his creations.

"""When we have once thought of big men and little men,' said Johnson, perversely enough, 'it is easy to do the rest.' The first step might, perhaps, seem in this case to be the easiest, yet nobody ever thought of it before Swift, and nobody has ever had similar good for. tune since. There is no other fictitious world the deni

zens of which have become so real for us and which has supplied so many images familiar to every educated mind. But the apparent ease is due to the extreme consistency and sound judgment of Swift's realization. The conclusions follow so inevitably from the primary data, that when they are once drawn we agree that they could not be otherwise, and infer, rashly, that anybody else could have drawn them. It is as easy as lying; but everybody who has seriously tried the experiment knows that even lying is by no means so easy as it appears at first sight. In fact, Swift's success is something unique. The charming plausibility of every incident throughout the two first parts, commends itself to children, who enjoy definite concrete images, and are fascinated by a world which is at once full of marvels surpassing Jack the Giant Killer and the wonders seen by Sindbad, and yet as obviously and undeniably true as the adventures of Robinson Crusoe himself." This is, of course, more even than the edge of the satire, the true cause of Gulliver's popularity, and not among children only.

In arranging the present selection, I have sought to give especial prominence to this peculiar power of realization, which lends a unique charm to Swift's narrative. Of the extracts from Gulliver, which fill a third of this volume, half were chosen on account of the microscopic realism of the pictures they present of purely imaginary states of existence. Such extracts are the "Reception in Lilliput," perhaps the most successful example of the logical expansion of a fanciful hypothesis in English literature; the "Inventory," where the same idea is consistently developed; the "Capture of the Fleet"; and the meeting with the

Gray Houyhnhnm, which to my mind possesses a grace and charm which cannot be matched in all the rest of the wonderful book. The other extracts from Gulliver show Swift's vein of cynical satire in its most sober and restrained dignity. We feel, as Hazlitt said, that we are reading the measured judgments of some inhabitant of a higher sphere, who looks down with sovereign contempt upon the hollow pretences, the puny rivalries, the gratuitous falsehoods, which go to help out the "ridiculous tragedy" called life. The King of Brobdingnag's “Inquiry" reads as coldly and judicially as a state paper. The passion and scorn that underlie the calmest irony in Swift is here so subdued that it might almost pass unsuspected. There is little of the exuberant slashing ridicule of the Tub or the Books; it is rather the expression of the contemptuous despair of one who has seen through life, and pronounces it altogether vanity. The quiet hopelessness of the satire reaches its most gloomy stage in the picture of the Struldbrugs, where Swift turns the Tithonus myth into a horrible reality, and shows us old age in its most revolting and dismal aspect.

I have drawn less freely than some will perhaps approve from the voyage to Laputa; but when it was necessary to exclude even some of the most celebrated passages in Lilliput and Brobdingnag, it was inevitable that the inferior work of the third voyage should be represented very briefly. The hitherto unpublished addition to Laputa, however, printed in the Notes, will make some amends for the omissions in the text.

The studiously restrained contempt of the satire and the extraordinary lifelike quality of the narrative make Gulliver Swift's greatest work; but there are many