Page:Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships.djvu/16

viii ''felt by them, even though he had been compelled to school his pride into the humility of subordination. As the henchman of his patron, he had entered the lists in a great literary controversy, and in The Battle of the Books had contributed to that controversy its one immortal monument. Entering the Church with no consuming enthusiasm, but not until he could do so without any suspicion of compulsion, he had become thenceforth her faithful servant, permitting to himself no deviation from her discipline, and compelling a mind of unexampled freedom to a strict obedience to her creed: an obedience which he demanded from others less in a spirit of dogmatism than from a haughty contempt for any possible liberty which human reason might assume. In the Tale of a Tub he discussed with a freedom which he himself scarcely recognised, much as it alarmed the more timid of his contemporaries, the largest questions of the day—the pretensions of rising science, the impotence of human reason, the immeasurable follies of man- kind : and he did so with an almost apathetic disregard for conventional modes of thought, and habits of reverence. At first, by accident and connexionsconnections [sic], he had found himself the ally of the Whigs : but his loyalty to the Church, his impatience of party shibboleths, and the pervading influence of personal resentment, as well as anger at personal neglect, had all combined to drive him into the arms of their opponents. Received with ready welcome by his new allies, lie had found his pride flattered by their confidence, and became their chief defender. The intimate adviser of ministers, deeply concerned in political schemes which were felt by some to be the prelude to great and far-reaching changes, and possibly the harbingers of high ideals, he was drawn into bonds of ever-increasing strength and closeness : and personal attachment, satisfied pride, the consciousness of power, the irresistible attraction of a great scene of action, riveted these bonds with the intensity of conviction. To him the schemes of the Tory Ministry of Queen Anne's last years, although they were not rarely degraded by''