A reading from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

This is the fourth of Mr Watkins's series of readings from Gulliver's Travels, and by now, possibly, many people who remembered the book rather vaguely as an amusing fantasy that they read as children will have been aroused to start reading it again. For as a writer of terse, significant English and a satirist of the weaknesses, not of a nation or an age, but of mankind, Swift has never been surpassed. His satire never becomes ponderous, and his narrative is so vigorous that it carries its moral lightly. Lemuel Gulliver 's adventures class him with Alan Breck Stewart and Robinson Crusoe and the other heroes of fiction popular among boys, at the age when their taste runs rather to the classic romances, before the railway-bookstall-film-star heroes begin to exert their far less honest appeal. One can read Gulliver, or at least the Brobdignag and Lilliput episodes of it, as an adventure story without worrying about the satire; but when one is old enough to have a little experience of the vices and meannesses that it pillories, the satire is all the more deadly for its innocent disguise.