ABSTRACT

The celebrated Travels of Gulliver were given to the public under the mystery which usually shadowed Jonathan Swift's publications. The Voyage to the Land of the Houyhnhnms is a composition which an editor of him must ever consider with pain. He has the more easily attained the perfection of fictitious narrative, because in all his works of whatever description, he has maintained the most undeviating attention to the point at issue. Pope, as a student of polite learning, and Swift as a man of the world, accustomed to live with statesmen, and to witness the transactions of public business, looked down with the contempt of ignorance upon the pursuits of speculative philosophy. The gross blunders made by the former respecting the nature and purpose of mathematical research are kept in countenance by Swift's account of the mathematicians of Laputa.