tail like unto a scorpion, and a sting in his tail; but his 'face is not
as the face of man, his hair is not as the hair of women, and on his
head there is no crown like gold.' All Swift's creations are more or
less disgusting. Not one of them is beautiful. His Lilliputians are
amazingly life-like, but compare them to Shakspeare's fairies, such
as Peaseblossom, Cobweb, and Mustardseed; his Brobdignagians are
excrescences like enormous warts; and his Yahoos might have been spawned
in the nightmare of a drunken butcher. The same coarseness characterises
his poems and his 'Tale of a Tub.' He might well, however, in his old
age, exclaim, in reference to the latter, 'Good God! what a genius I
had when I wrote that book!' It is the wildest, wittiest, wickedest,
wealthiest book of its size in the English language. Thoughts and
figures swarm in every corner of its pages, till you think of a
disturbed nest of angry ants, for all the figures and thoughts are black
and bitter. One would imagine the book to have issued from a mind that
had been gathering gall as well as sense in an antenatal state of being.

Swift, in all his writings--sermons, political tracts, poems, and
fictions--is essentially a satirist. He consisted originally of three
principal parts,--sense, an intense feeling of the ludicrous, and
selfish passion; and these were sure, in certain circumstances, to
ferment into a spirit of satire, 'strong as death, and cruel as the
grave.' Born with not very much natural benevolence, with little purely
poetic feeling, with furious passions and unbounded ambition, he was
entirely dependent for his peace of mind upon success. Had he become, as
by his talents he was entitled to be, the prime minister of his day, he
would have figured as a greater tyrant in the cabinet than even Chatham.
But as he was prevented from being the first statesman, he became the
first satirist of his time. From vain efforts to grasp supremacy for
himself and his party, he retired growling to his Dublin den; and there,