Yet more remarkable is the skill of the author in maintaining the probability of the allegory. When living among the Lilliputians, Gulliver insensibly adopts their ideas of size. He admires as much as they the prowess of the horseman who clears his shoe at a single leap. When the committee of the Lilliputian king examine Gulliver's pockets, they describe his handkerchief as a "great piece of coarse cloth, large enough to be a foot-cloth to your majesty's chief room of state"; his purse is "a net, almost large enough for a fisherman," containing "several massy pieces of yellow metal, which, if they be real gold, must be of immense value." The same almost mathematical accuracy of proportion is kept up in the visit to Brobdingnag, and on Gulliver's return to his native country he experiences as much trouble in reaccustoming his mind to the ordinary standard as he had met with in adopting that of pigmies or giants. There was a country clergyman living in Ireland, who declared there were some things in Gulliver's Travels he could not quite believe. His difficulty probably occurred in the "Voyage to the Houyhnhnms." In the latter part of the work Swift allowed the fiction to yield to the exigencies of the satire. So long as we can imagine the existence of giants and pigmies, it is easy to realize all the circumstances connected with Gulliver's existence among them, but it is impossible to feel the same sense of reality in regard to horses who live in houses they could not build, and who eat oats they could not harvest.[154]
The general desire for reform is not more clearly to be seen in Acts of Parliament than in the works of Swift and Addison. The earlier part of the century was marked by a strong realization of evil, and by a constantly growing inclination to suppress it. The first condition is illustrated by the fierce satire of "Gulliver's Travels," the second by the earnest admonitions of the _Spectator_. The two great authors make a striking contrast. Swift, misanthropic, miserable, bitter; Addison, happy, loving mankind, admired alike by ally and opponent, Swift, dying mad; Addison, calm, conscious, employing his last moments to ask pardon of one he had offended. The same contrast is in their works. Swift dwelt and gloated on the evil about him, exposed it in more than its own deformity, and left his reader to reflect on his own degradation. Addison, to whom that evil was almost equally apparent, but who turned from its contemplation with horror, exerted all his talents to correct it. "The great and only end of these speculations," he tells the reader of the _Spectator_, "is to banish vice and ignorance out of the territories of Great Britain."