He
subsequently became Dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin, and for a period
achieved great popularity owing to his powerful political writings.
While in what he called his "exile" he wrote _Gulliver's Travels_, which
was at first published anonymously, the secret of the authorship being
so closely guarded that the publisher did not know who was the author.
Dr. Johnson characterized it as "A production so new and strange that it
filled the reader with admiration and amazement. It was read by the high
and low, the learned and the illiterate." In this work, Jonathan Swift
appears as one of the greatest masters of English we have ever had; as
endowed with an imaginative genius inferior to few; as a keen and
pitiless critic of the world, and a bitter misanthropic accounter of
humanity at large. Dean Swift was indeed a misanthrope by theory,
however he may have made exception to private life. His hero, Gulliver,
discovers race after race of beings who typify the genera in his
classification of mankind. Extremely diverting are Gulliver's adventures
among the tiny Lilliputians; only less so are his more perilous
encounters with the giants of Brobdingnag.... By a singular dispensation
of Providence, we usually read the _Travels_ while we are children; we
are delighted with the marvellous story, we are not at all injured by
the poison.
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