For Swift could love and could pray." Left to himself and to the natural thoughts of his mind, without those "orders" to which he had bound himself as a necessary part of his trade, he could have turned to his God with questionings which need not then have been heartbreaking.

"It is my belief," says Thackeray, "that he suffered frightfully from the consciousness of his own scepticism, and that he had bent his pride so far down as to put his apostasy out to hire." I doubt whether any of Swift's works are very much read now, but perhaps Gulliver's travels are oftener in the hands of modern readers than any other.

Of all the satires in our language it is probably the most cynical, the most absolutely illnatured, and therefore the falsest.
Let those who care to form an opinion of Swift's mind from the best known of his works, turn to Thackeray's account of Gulliver.

I can imagine no greater proof of misery than to have been able to write such a book as that.
It is thus that the lecturer concludes his lecture about Swift.

"He shrank away from all affections sooner or later.