The noise of the Drapier Letters was followed by the anony mous publication of Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, in four parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon and then a captain of several ships (Benjamin Motto, Oct. 1726), the work being well advanced, it would seem, by 1720. The keen ness of the satire on courts, parties and statesmen certainly sug gests that it was planned while Swift's disappointments as a public man were still rankling and recent. Although he was afraid of the reception the book would meet with, especially in political circles, the world chose to be diverted by it. In the first two parts the misanthropy is quite overpowered by the fun. The third part, equally masterly in composition, is less felicitous in invention; and in the fourth Swift has indeed carried out his design of vex ing the world at his own cost.
Swift's grave humour and power of enforcing momentous truth by ludicrous exaggeration were next displayed in his Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burden to their Parents or the Country, by fattening and eating them (1729). The Directions to Servants, a satire on domestics, was first published in 1745, while Polite Conversation, written in 1731 was published in 1738. Little beyond occasional verses— trivial and often indecent—followed, but the delightful Hamil ton's Bawn, and the verses on his own death (1731) are excep tions, and in The Legion Club of 1736 he composed the fiercest of all his verse satires. His popularity remained as great as ever
(he received the freedom of Dublin in 1729), and he governed his cathedral with great strictness and conscientiousness; but the attacks of giddiness to which he had always been subject increased upon him, and he grew more and more capricious and morbidly suspicious. In March 1742 it was necessary to appoint guardians of Swift's person and estate. In September of the same year his physical malady reached a crisis, from which he emerged a help less wreck, with faculties paralysed rather than destroyed, and he eventually sank into the dementia which preceded his death on Oct. 19, 1745. He was interred in his cathedral at midnight in a coffin by the side of Stella's. His epitaph was written by himself.
An object of pity as well as of awe, Swift is one of the most tragic figures of English literature. His master passion was im perious pride—lust for despotic dominion ; place, profit and lit erary fame were comparatively indifferent to him. Contemptuous of the opinion of his fellows, he hid his virtues, paraded his faults, affected some failings from which he was really exempt, and, since his munificent charity could not be concealed from the recipients, laboured to spoil it by gratuitous surliness. "To think of him," says Thackeray, "is like thinking of the ruin of a great empire." Among those influenced by Swift may be mentioned Chesterfield, Smollett, Cobbett, Hazlitt, Scott, Borrow, Newman, Belloc_