The "Travels of Lemuel Gulliver" were dropped, said the publisher, at his house, in the dark, from a hackney-coach. In regard to this work, the Dean followed his custom of sending out his writings to the world to make their way on their own merits, without the assistance of his name. But the authorship of the book could not long remain unknown before the storm of applause and curiosity which it immediately excited. It was a production, said Johnson,[152] "so new and strange that it filled the reader with a mingled emotion of merriment and amazement. It was received with such avidity, that the price of the first edition was raised before the second could be made; it was read by the high and the low, the learned and illiterate. Criticism was for a while lost in wonder; no rules of judgment were applied to a book written in open defiance of truth and regularity." Whether read for the satire or the story, the adventures of Gulliver proved equally fascinating. They "offered personal and political satire to the readers in high life, low and coarse incidents to the vulgar, marvels to the romantic, wit to the young and lively, lessons of morality and policy to the grave, and maxims of deep and bitter misanthropy to neglected age and disappointed ambition."[153]
The early part of the eighteenth century offered rich material to the satirist, and Swift brought to his work unparalleled fierceness and power. He attacked the corruption of the politician and the minister, the vanity and vice of the courtier, the folly and extravagance of the fashionable world, and gathering venom in his course, made his satire universal and painted the pettiness and deformity of the human race. But among the follies and vices of mankind, vanity was the fault most offensive to Swift, and that which he lashed with his most bitter invective. To ridicule human pride, and to expose its inconsistency with the imperfection of man, is the ruling object of his great satirical romance. On Gulliver's return to England from the land of the Houyhnhnms, where, under the degraded form of Yahoos, he had studied mankind as they appeared when influenced by all human vices and brutal instincts unveiled by hypocrisy or civilization, he describes his horror at observing the existence of vanity among his countrymen who resembled Yahoos so closely;--