In his second voyage, that to Brobdignag, his satirical imagination took a wider range--European politics as they appear to a superior intelligence, illustrated by a man of _sixty_ feet in comparison with one of _six_. As Gulliver had looked with curious contempt upon the united efforts of the Lilliputians, he now found himself in great jeopardy and fear when in the hands of a giant of Brobdignag. As the pigmy metropolis, five hundred yards square, was to London, so were London and other European capitals to the giants' city, two thousand miles in circumference. And what are the armies of Europe, when compared with that magnificent cavalry manœuvring on a parade-ground twenty miles square, each mounted trooper ninety feet high, and all, as they draw their swords at command, representing ten thousand flashes of lightning? The third part contains the voyage of Gulliver--no less improbable than the former ones--to _Laputa_, the flying island of projectors and visionaries. This is a varied satire upon the Royal Society, the eccentricities of the savans, empirics of all kinds, mathematical magic, and the like. In this, political schemes to restore the pretender are aimed at. The Mississippi Scheme and the South Sea bubble are denounced. Here, too, in his journey to Luggnagg, he introduces the sad and revolting picture of the Struldbrugs, those human beings who live on, losing all their power and becoming hideously old. In his last voyage--to the land of the _Houyhnhnms_--his misanthropy is painfully manifest. This is the country where horses are masters, and men a servile and degraded race; and he has painted the men so brutish and filthy that the satire loses its point. The power of satire lies in contrast; we must compare the evil in men with the good: when the whole race is included in one sweeping condemnation, and an inferior being exalted, in opposition to all possibility, the standard is absurd, and the satirist loses his pains. The horses are the _Houyhnhnms_, (the name is an attempt to imitate a neigh,) a noble race, who are amazed and disgusted at the Yahoos,--the degraded men,--upon whom Swift, in his sweeping misanthropy, has exhausted his bitterness and his filth. STELLA AND VANESSA.--While Swift's mysterious associations with Stella and Vanessa have but little to do with the course of English Literature, they largely affect his personality, and no sketch of him would be complete without introducing them to the reader. We cannot conjure up the tall, burly form, the heavy-browed, scowling, contemptuous face, the sharp blue eye, and the bushy black hair of the dean, without seeing on one side and the other the two pale, meek-eyed, devoted women, who watch his every look, shrink from his sudden bursts of wrath, receive for their infatuation a few fair words without sentiment, and earnestly crave a little love as a return for their whole hearts. It is a wonderful, touching, baffling story.