It has never been popular; it is never likely to be popular; and one may almost say that it is sincerely to be hoped that it never will be popular.

For if it were, either all the world would be scoundrels, which would be a pity: or all the world would be philosophers and persons of taste, in which case it would be impossible, as the famous story has it, to "look down on one's fellow-creatures from a proper elevation." It really is a novel and a remarkable one--superior even to _Vanity Fair_, according to Thackeray's own definition, as a delineation of "a set of people living without God in the world." But it is even more (and here its only parallel is _A Tale of a Tub_, which is more desultory and much more of a _fatrasie_ or salmagundy of odds and ends) a masterpiece and quintessential example of irony.

Irony had come in with the plain prose style, without which it is almost impossible: and not merely Swift but others had done great things with it.

It is, however, only here that it reaches the quintessence just spoken of with a coherent and substantive purpose to serve as vehicle for it.

It is possibly too strong for most people's taste: and one may admit that, for anything like frequent enjoyment, it wants a certain admixture of the fantastic in its various senses--after the method of Voltaire in one way, of Beckford in another, of Peacock in a third, of Disraeli in a fourth--to make it acceptable to more than a very few.