245 leave has employed more time than the whole conversation before. The conclusion of a treatise resembles the conclusion of human life, which has sometimes been compared to the end of a feast, where few are satisfied to depart, ut plenus vitæ conviva; for men will sit down after the fullest meal, though it be only to doze or to sleep out the rest of the day. But in this latter I differ extremely from other writers; and shall be too proud if, by all my labours, I can have anyways contributed to the repose of mankind in times so turbulent and unquiet as these. Neither do I think such an employment so very alien from the office of a wit as some would suppose. For among a very polite nation in Greece, there were the same temples built and consecrated to Sleep and the Muses; between which two deities they be

TRAVEL S

INTO SEVERAL

lieved the strictest friendship was Remote NATIONS

established.

FROM "THE BATTLE OF

THE BOOKS."

I am glad, answered the bee, to hear you grant at least that I am come honestly by my wings and my voice; for then, it seems, I am obliged to Heaven alone for my flights and my music; and Providence would never have bestowed on me two such gifts, without designing them for the noblest ends.

OF THE

WORLD.

In FOUR PARTS.

I visit indeed all the flowers and By LEMUEL GULLIVER,

blossoms of the field and garden;

but whatever I collect thence enriches myself, without the least injury to their beauty, their smell, or their taste. Now, for you and your skill in architecture and other mathematics, I have little to say: in that building of yours there might, for aught I know, have been labour and method enough; but, by woeful experience for us both, it is too plain

First a SURGEON, and then a CAP-
TAIN of feveral SHIPS.

VOL. I.

LONDON.

the materials are naught; and I Printed for BENJ. MOTTE, at the

hope you will henceforth take warning, and consider duration and matter, as well as method and art. You boast indeed of being obliged to no other creature, but of drawing

Middle Temple-Gate in Fleet-ftreet.
MDCCXXVI.

and spinning out all from yourself; Title-page of First Edition of "Gulliver's Travels" that is to say, if we may judge of

the liquor in the vessel by what issues out, you possess a good plentiful store of dirt and poison in your breast; and, though I would by no means lessen or disparage your genuine stock of either, yet I doubt you are somewhat obliged, for an increase of both, to a little foreign assistance. Your inherent portion of dirt does not fail of acquisitions, by sweepings exhaled from below; and one insect furnishes you with a share of poison to destroy another. So that, in short, the question comes all to this; whether is the nobler being

of the two, that which, by a lazy contemplation of four inches round, by an overweening pride, feeding and engendering on itself, turns all into excrement and venom, pro

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their

in

the Kingdom of
call's Langdon where
Travels,

m

my

new

a mannen

Vegor

or

I told him that Tribmia by the Natives I had Sojourner Some sime the Bulk of the People consist in wholly of Discoverers. Witnesses. Informers St censors, Prosecutors, Evidences, Swearers, together with their several Subservient and Subaltern Instruments all under the Colours and Conduct of Monsters of State and their Deputys. The Plots in that Kingdom are usually the Workmanship of those Persons, desire to raise own Characters of profound Politicians, to restore to a crazy Fommistration, to stifle divert general Discontents, to fill their Pockets with Forfectures, and raise or find the Ogumon of publich Credit, as either Shall best answer their private Advantage. "It is first agreed and fettled among them what Suspected persons shall be accused, of a plot then effectual Care is taken to secure all their Letters and Papers, and put the Criminals Chains. These Papers are delivered to a set of Artists very Denebrous finding out the mysterious Meanings of Words, Syllables, and Letters. For Infiance, they can discover

m

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to Signity a Privy Council, a I look of Geese

a

a. Senate,

Lame Dog

the Plague

a

Snrrader, a
Standing Army.

prime Minister, the Gout

A Page of the MS. of "Gulliver's Travels"

a

a

ducing nothing at all but flybane and a cobweb; or that which, by a universal range, with long search, much study, true judgment, and distinction of things, brings home honey and wax.

ESSAY ON A BROOMSTICK.

This single stick, which you now behold ingloriously lying in that neglected corner, I once knew in a flourishing state in a forest: it was full of sap, full of leaves, and full of boughs; but now, in vain does the busy art of man pretend to vie with nature, by tying that withered bundle of twigs to its sapless trunk it is now, at best, but the reverse of what it was, a tree turned upside down, the branches on the earth, and the root in the air; it is now handled by every dirty wench, condemned to do her drudgery, and, by a capricious kind of fate, destined to make other things clean, and be nasty itself at length, worn to the stumps in the service of the maids, it is either thrown out of doors, or condemned to the last use, of kindling a fire. When I beheld this I sighed, and said within myself, Surely man is a broomstick! Nature sent him into the world strong and lusty, in a thriving condition, wearing his own hair on his head, the proper branches of this reasoning vegetable, until the axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs, and left him a withered trunk: he then flies to art, and puts on a periwig, valuing himself upon an unnatural bundle of hairs (all covered with powder), that never grew on his head; but now, should this our broomstick pretend to enter the scene, proud of those birchen spoils it never bore, and all covered with dust, though the sweepings of the finest lady's chamber, we should be apt to ridicule and despise its vanity. Partial judges that we are of our own excellences and other men's defaults!

But a broomstick, perhaps you will say, is an emblem of a tree standing on its head; and pray what is man, but a topsy-turvy creature, his animal faculties perpetually mounted on his rational, his head where his heels should be, grovelling on the earth! and yet, with all his faults, he sets up to be a universal reformer and corrector of abuses, a remover of grievances, rakes into every slut's corner of nature, bringing hidden corruption to the light, and raises a mighty dust where there was none before; sharing deeply all the while in the very same pollutions he pretends to sweep away his last days are spent in slavery to women, and generally the least deserving; till, worn out to the stumps, like his brother besom, he is either kicked out of doors, or made use of to kindle flames for others to warm themselves by.

CONVERSATION.

Raillery is the finest part of conversation; but, as it is our usual custom to counterfeit and adulterate whatever is too dear for us, so we have done with this, and turned it all into what is generally called repartee, or being smart, just as when an expensive fashion comes up, those who are not able to reach it content themselves with some paltry imitation. It now passes for raillery to run a man down in discourse, to put him out of countenance, and make him ridiculous; sometimes to expose the defects of his person or understanding; on all which occasions, he is obliged not to be angry, to avoid the imputation of not being able to take a jest. It is admirable to observe one who is dexterous at this art, singling out a weak adversary, getting the laugh on his side, and then carrying all before him. The French, from whence we borrow the word, have a quite different idea of the thing, and so had we in the politer age of our fathers. Raillery was to say something that at first appeared a reproach or reflection, but, by some turn of wit, unexpected and surprising, ended always in a compliment, and to the advantage of the person it was addressed to. And surely one of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish we had rather left unsaid: nor can there anything be well more contrary to the ends for which people meet together, than to part unsatisfied with each other or themselves.

Swift declared that if the world had contained a dozen Arbuthnots Gulliver's Travels should have been burned. The charming physician was not only one of the very few persons whom Swift respected, but of his own generation the first to come completely under his literary influence.

John

Arbuthnot
(1667-173)

If we take the lash out of the style of Swift, we have that of JOHN ARBUTHNOT, who can often hardly be distinguished from his friend and master. Without personal ambition of any kind, no vanity deterred Arbuthnot from frankly adopting, as closely as he could, the manner of the man whom he admired the most. As he was a perfectly sane and normal person, with plenty of wit and accomplishment, and without a touch of misanthropy, Arbuthnot served to popularise and to bring into general circulation the peculiar characteristics of Swift, and to reconcile him with his contemporaries.

John Arbuthnot (1667-1735) was born in April 1667, at Arbuthnot, in Kincardineshire; his father was a clergyman of the Episcopal Church. He was educated at Aberdeen, probably in Marischal College. At the Revolution, his father lost his preferment, and the family was broken up. Arbuthnot took his degree of bachelor of physic at St. Andrews, and came in 1691 to London. There he is said to have lodged with a woollendraper, and to have taught mathematics for a living. In the autumn of 1694 he went, as a fellow-commoner, to University College, Oxford, where he stayed two years, but took his degree of M.D. in 1696, at St. Andrews. At Oxford he acted as private tutor to Edward Jeffreys, eldest son of Jeffrey Jeffreys, afterwards Sir Jeffrey; without some support of this kind he would have been too poor to go to Oxford. All Arbuthnot's early publications were on mathematical subjects, and he seems to have been but very slowly successful as a physician. He was so fortunate, how

ever, as to be suddenly called in to attend Prince George of Denmark in a serious illness, and to treat him successfully. In consequence, Arbuthnot was, in October 1705, appointed Physician Extraordinary to Queen Anne, and he now rose steadily in emoluments and scientific reputation. About 1710 he began to move in the little circle of wits which moved around Pope, Gay, and Swift, and something in Arbuthnot's temper and character particularly recommended him to the last-mentioned. Hitherto Arbuthnot had been looked somewhat askance upon by the leaders of his own profession, but having in 1709 been made Physician in Ordinary to the Queen, he

was elected Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1710. It was in 1712 that, urged by Swift, Arbuthnot published the two anonymous tracts on which his fame as a satirical writer is mainly founded, Law is a Bottomless Pit, and John Bull in his Senses. These, with other treatises of the same year, were reprinted together as The History of John Bull, long attributed to Swift. Arbuthnot never admitted that the authorship was his, and we should still be in doubt, had not Swift happened to make an explicit statement on the subject when writing to Stella. To 1712 also belongs the Pseudologia Politike, or Art of Political Lying. Arbuthnot was one of the original members of the Scriblerus Club, and he was busily engaged on the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus when Queen Anne died. This event was a severe blow to Arbuthnot, and he went to Paris, in the hope, it would appear, of becoming physician to the young French king. In this he was disappointed, and reappeared in London, where he took a house in Dover Street, St. James's, and devoted himself to private practice. In 1717 he joined Pope and Gay in writing the comedy of Three Hours after Marriage. He went to France again in 1718. In 1727 he was appointed Harveian Orator. Arbuthnot suffered from chronic asthma, which gave him more and more persistent discomfort, and towards the end of his life he gave particular attention to the causes and the mitigation of this disease. In 1732 was printed, in the Gentleman's Magazine, his sardonic epitaph on Colonel Charteris; this brilliant piece of invective, which was hugely admired, was said to "shine like the moon among the lesser fires" of wit in the age of Anne. In the hope of obtaining relief from his asthma and dropsy, Arbuthnot retired in 1734 to Hampstead, where he suffered so much that, in reply to an affectionate letter from Pope, he declared "the kindest wish of my friends is a euthanasia." He was taken back, for greater comfort, to his house in Cork Street, Burlington Gardens, where he died on the 27th of February 1735, and was buried in St. James's Church, Piccadilly. The writings of Arbuthnot were cast forth so carelessly, and, with unimportant exceptions, with so little indication of authorship, that he is perhaps of all eminent English writers the one about whose bibliography the greatest obscurity prevails.

ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND.

John [Bull] had a sister, a poor girl that had been starved at nurse; anybody would have guessed Miss to have been bred up under the influence of a cruel step-dame, and John to be the fondling of a tender mother. John looked ruddy and plump, with a pair of cheeks like a trumpeter; Miss looked pale and wan, as if she had the green-sickness; and no wonder, for John was the darling, he had all the good bits, was crammed with good pullet, chicken, pig, goose and capon; while Miss had only a little oatmeal and water, or a dry crust without butter. John had his golden pippins, peaches and nectarines; poor Miss a crab-apple, sloe, or a blackberry. Master lay in the best apartment, with his bed-chamber toward the south sun. Miss lodged in a garret exposed to the north wind, which shrivelled her countenance; however, this usage, tho' it stunted the girl in her growth, gave her a hardy constitution; she had life and spirit in abundance, and knew when she was ill-used: now and then she would seize upon John's commons, snatch a leg of a pullet, or a bit of good beef, for which they were sure to go to fisticuffs. Master was indeed too strong for her, but Miss would not yield in the least point, but even when Master got her down, she would scratch and bite like a tiger; when he gave her a cuff on the ear, she would prick him with her knitting-needle.