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 And the King makes no more than a general comment upon the intrigues of politicians, when he says that, by the answers he has "wringed and extorted" from Gulliver, he cannot but conclude "the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin, that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." What more do we find here than a picturesque interpretation of Walpole and his government?

It is plain, moreover, that Swift puts in the mouth of the Brobdingnagian King his own hopes and opinions. By a stroke of irony, he confesses that the learning most highly prized by the giants, being wholly applied to the improvement of agriculture and the mechanical arts, would be as little esteemed among us, as the ideas, entities, abstractions and transcendental, which we ourselves prized, would be esteemed among them. It is plain also that Swift accepts as his own the generous creed of the King of Brobdingnag, "that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow 31