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Gulliver's Travels: Houyhnhnms

A later voyage took me to the country of the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms. These Yahoos, being servile attendants to the Houyhnhnms, were of disgusting habits, and so much resembled human beings that the wise and virtuous Houyhnhnms took me also for a Yahoo even to the end of my stay with them, a judgment which grieved me much.

The Houyhnhnms, who had the forms of horses, had the most sensible laws of any creature that I ever lived with. Their abhorrence of many of our human habits was so deep that I came in time to have a contempt for my own species and wished that I, too, were a Houyhnhnm and be allowed to remain with them; but they banished me from their kingdom as one who might set up for a leader of the Yahoos and so some time give them trouble. They allowed me to build and provision a boat, and so I paddled off and in time reached England, where my wife and children were very glad to see me.

THACKERAY UNLESS one knows the rollicking humor of Thackeray as it lives in his burlesque and ballads, his whole genius can scarcely be appreciated. His early successes, signed by Titmarsh and Yellow-plush, sparkling through the pages of "Punch," with pungent satire and abounding buffoonery, contained many germs of his great novels. Parodies of famous contemporaries--Disraeli, Bulwer, and others--made merriment for Londoners in "Punch's Prize Novelists." "The Legend of the Rhine," burlesques a novel of Dumas's, but his masterpiece in this field is "Rowena and Rebecca," the brilliant and matchless burlesque of Scott's "Ivanhoe." It not only ripples along with broad, roaring fun, but it is touched as well with pathos and genuine humor. Scattered through it are some of the best songs of their kind in English literature. Thackeray's ease in rhyming was incomparable. While he possessed true poetic feeling, he particularly excelled in rollicking verse and in ballad-making. In this his characteristic pathos, his indignation at wrongs, and his distinctive sallies of fun especially shine. "The Willow Tree," "The White Squall," "The Mahogany Tree," and "The Sorrows of Werther" will always be dear to many. All true Bohemians will relish the "Ballad of Bouillabaisse." No doubt many of our boys "over there" have tasted the famous dish itself as well as the joys of fellowship and the pangs for comrades "gone west," so sympathetically sung in this ballad.