TRAVELS

INTO SEVERAL REMOTE NATIONS OF THE WORLD.

BY LEMUEL GULLIVER,

First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships.

IN FOUR PARTS.

I. A VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT.

II. A VOYAGE TO BROBDINGNAG.

MI. A VOYAGE TO LAPUTA, BALNIBARBI, LUGGNAGG, GLubb

DUBDRIB, AND JAPAN.

IV. A VOYAGE TO THE COUNTRY OF THE HOUYHNHNMS

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS.

THIS celebrated Satirical Romance has extended the name and the reputation of its author to nations who might never have heard of the favourite of Lord Oxford, the champion of the church of England, or even the protector of the liberties of Ireland. The first sketch of the work occurs in the proposed travels of Martinus Scriblerus,* devised in that agreeable society where the rest of the miscellanies were planned. Had the work been executed under the same auspices, it would probably have been occupied by that personal satire upon obscure and unworthy contemporaries to which Pope was but too much addicted. But when the dean

Pope has not forgotten to intimate this in the concluding chapter of the Memoirs of Scriblerus "It was in the year 1699 that Martin set out on his travels. Thou wilt certainly be very curious to know what they were. It is not yet time to inform thee. But what hints I am at liberty to give, I will.

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Thou shalt know then, that in his first voyage he was carried by a prosperous storm to a discovery of the remains of the ancient Pygmæan empire.

"That, in his second, he was happily shipwrecked on the land of the Giants, now the most humane people in the world.

"That, in his third voyage, he discovered a whole kingdom of philosophers, who govern by the mathematics; with whose admirable schemes and projects be returned to benefit his own dear country; but had the misfortune to find them rejected by the envious ministers of Queen Anne, and himself sent treacherously away.

"And hence it is that, in his fourth voyage, he discovers a vein of melancholy, proceeding almost to a disgust of the species; but, above all, a mortal detestation to the whole flagitious race of ministers, and a final resolution not to give in any memorial to the secretary of state, in order to subject the lands he discovered to the crown of Great Britain.

"Now if, by these hints, the reader can help himself to a farther disco

mused in solitude over the execution of his plan, it assumed at once a more grand and a darker complexion. The spirit of indignant hatred and contempt with which he regarded the mass of humanity, his quick and powerful perception of their failings, errors, and crimes, his zeal for liberty and freedom of thought, tended at once to generalize, while it embittered his satire, and to change traits of personal severity for that deep shade of censure which Gulliver's Travels throw upon mankind universally. This tone of mind gained upon the author, as we shall have occasion to remark when we examine the voyages separately.

The general idea of the work is unquestionably borrowed from the True History of Lucian, a fictitious journey through imaginary countries, prefaced by an introduction, in an exquisite vein of irony, upon the art of writing history. The allusions which this work probably contained to the histories of the time are lost to us; but there is a pleasing luxuriance of imagination which runs through the whole, and renders it still agreeable to the modern reader, notwithstanding the extravagance of some parts of the fiction, and the flatness of others. From the True History of Lucian, Cyrano Bergerac took his idea of a Journey to the Moon, and Rabelais derived his yet more famous Voyage of Pantagruel. Swift has consulted both, as well as their common original, but is more particularly indebted to the work of Rabelais, which satirizes severely the various orders of the law and clergy of his period, In a tract, republished in the Harleian Miscellany, said to have been written by Dr Francis Goodwin, bishop of Llandaff, who died in 1633, called the Man in the Moon, or the Discourse of a Voyage thither by Domingo Gonsalez, we have men of enormous stature and of prodigious longevity; a flying chariot also, and some other slight points of resemblance to the Travels of Gulliver.* But none of

very of the nature and contents of these travels, he is welcome to as much light as they afford him: I am obliged, by all the ties of honour, not to speak more openly,

"But if any man shall see such very extraordinary voyages, into such very extraordinary nations, which manifest the most distinguishing marks of a philosopher, a politician, and a legislator, and can imagine them to belong to a surgeon of a ship, or a captain of a merchantman, let him remain in his ignorance.

"And, whoever he be, he shall farther observe, in every page of such a book, that cordial love of mankind, that inviolable regard to truth, that passion for his dear country, and that particular attachment to the excellent princess Queen Anne :-Surely that man deserves to be pitied, if, by all those visible signs and characters, he cannot distinguish and acknowledge the great Scriblerus."-POPE's Works, ed. 1806, 8vo, vol. VI., p. 171-173.

The Journey of Nicolas Klimius to the World under Ground, written by

these works either approach in excellence, or anticipate in originality, the romance of Swift. They are, in comparison, eccentric, wild, and childish fables, neither conveying a useful moral nor an amusing satire. The passages of satirical allusion are few, and thrown at random, among a scattered mass of incoherent fiction. But no word drops from Gulliver's pen in vain. Where his work ceases for a moment to satirize the vices of mankind in general, it becomes a stricture upon the parties, politics, and court of Britain; where it abandons that subject of censure, it presents a lively picture of the vices and follies of the fashionable world, or of the vain pursuits of philosophy, while the parts of the narrative which refer to the traveller's own adventures form a humourous and striking parody of the manner of old voyagers; their dry and minute style, and the unimportant personal incidents with which their journals are encumbered. These are inserted with an address which, abstracted from the marvellous part of the narrative, would almost induce us to believe we were perusing a real story. This art of introducing trifling and minute anecdotes, upon which nothing depends, or is made to turn, was perhaps imitated by Swift from the romances of De Foe, who carried the air of authenticity to the highest pitch of perfection in his Robinson Crusoe, and Memoirs of a Cavalier. It is, indeed, a marked difference between real and fictitious narrative, that the latter includes only such incidents as the author conceives will interest the reader, whereas the former is uniformly invested with many petty particulars, which can only be interesting to the narrator himself. Another distinction is, that, in the course of a real story, circumstances occur which lead neither to consequences nor to explanations; whereas the novelist is, generally speaking, cautious to introduce no incident or character which has not some effect in forwarding his plot. For example, Crusoe tells us, in the beginning of his history, that he had a second brother, an adventurer like himself, of whom his family could never learn the fate. Scarcely a man but De Foe himself would have concluded the adventures of Crusoe without again introducing this brother. But he was well aware that the course of human life is as irregular and capricious as the process of natural vegetation; and that a trim parterre does not more accurately point out

Baron Holberg, a Norwegian, born in 1684, in the nature and cynical point of the satire, approaches much more nearly to Gulliver's Travels than any of the works mentioned in the text. But although I do not know the precise date of the first edition, I have no doubt that it is posterior to Swift's work, and has been founded upon it.