Explanation:

Very often the chief Ministers themselves are commanded to show their skill and to convince the emperor that they have not lost their faculty.

Answer: These lines belong to Chapter 3, Part 1 of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. These lines symbolically refer to the cunning skills of the politicians as a whole.

Though initially, Gulliver received maltreatment from the Lilliputians, he was, however, within a short time, able to win the favor of the Emperor and get rid of the bitterness that he was facing from the beginning. To his great amusement, he had been experiencing new things every day among the Lilliputs. One of the most amusing things was rope dancing. The performance was made by the candidates for high offices at the Imperial Court. Swift, in fact, ridicules here the English court and the courtiers for their villainous virtues. Performances such as jumping or crawling or rope dancing do sound very ironic here. The dancing on a tightrope symbolizes skills in parliamentary tactics and political intrigues prevailing in then England.

Swift’s use of rope dancing is a source of great amusement for the readers. However, his genuine intention here is not to amuse the readers but to satirize the tactful skills of the English political figures that they used for getting promotions or higher positions in the party or in the government.