my travels to be published. Pray bring to your mind how often I desired you to consider, when you insisted on the motive of public good, that the Yahoos were a species of animals utterly incapable of amendment by precepts or example: and so it has proved; for, instead of seeing a full stop put to all abuses and corruptions, at least in this little island, as I had reason to expect, behold, after above six months' warning, I cannot learn that my book has produced one single effect according to my intentions. I desired you would let me know, by a letter, when party and faction were extinguished; judges learned and upright; pleaders honest and modest, with some tincture of common sense, and Smithfield blazing with pyramids of law books; the young nobility's education entirely changed; the physicians banished; the female Yahoos abounding in virtue, honour, truth, and good sense; courts and levees of great ministers thoroughly weeded and swept; wit, merit, and learning rewarded; all disgracers of the press, in prose and verse, condemned to eat nothing but their own cotton, and quench their thirst with their own ink. These and a thousand other reformations, I firmly counted upon by your encouragement; as, indeed, they were plainly deducible from the precepts delivered in my book. And it must be owned, that seven months were a sufficient time to correct every vice and folly to which Yahoos are subject, if their natures had been capable of the least disposition to virtue or wisdom. Yet, so far have you been from answering my expectation in any of your letters, that, on the contrary, you are loading our carrier every week with libels, and keys, and reflections, and memoirs, and second parts; wherein I see myself accused of reflecting upon great state folks; of degrading human nature, (for so they have still the confidence to style

it), and of abusing the female sex. I find, likewise, that the writers of those bundles are not agreed among themselves; for some of them will not allow me to be the author of my own travels, and others make me author of books to which I am wholly a stranger.

I find, likewise, that your printer has been so careless as to confound the times, and mistake the dates, of my several voyages and returns; neither assigning the true year, nor the true month, nor day of the month: and I hear the original manuscript is all destroyed since the publication of my book; neither have I any copy left. However, I have sent you some corrections, which you may insert, if ever there should be a second edition : and yet I cannot stand to them, but shall leave that matter to my judicious and candid readers, to adjust it as they please.

I hear some of our sea Yahoos find fault with my sea language, as not proper in many parts, nor now

in use. I cannot help it. In my first voyages, while I was young, I was instructed by the oldest mariners, and learned to speak as they did. But I

* That the original copy of these Travels was altered by the person through whose hands it was conveyed to the press, is a fact; but the passages of which Mr. Gulliver complains in this letter are to be found only in the first editions; for the Dean, having restored the text wherever it had been altered, sent the copy to the late Mr. Motte, by the hands of Mr. Charles Ford. This copy has been exactly followed in every subsequent edition, except that printed in Ireland by Mr. Faulkner; the editor of which, supposing the Dean to be serious when he mentioned the corruptions of dates, and yet finding them unaltered, thought fit to alter them himself. There is, however, scarce one of these alterations in which he has not committed a blunder; though, while he was thus busy in defacing the parts that were perfect, he suffered the accidental blemishes of others to remain.-H.

† See the account of the storm at the commencement of the Second Voyage.

have since found that the sea Yahoos are apt, like the land ones, to become new-fangled in their words, which the latter change every year; insomuch, as I remember, upon each return to my own country, their old dialect was so altered, that I could hardly understand the new. And I observe, when any Yahoo comes from London, out of curiosity, to visit me at my house, we neither of us are able to deliver our conceptions in a manner intelligible to the other.

If the censure of the Yahoos could anyway affect me, I should have great reason to complain that some of them are so bold as to think my book of travels a mere fiction out of mine own brain; and have gone so far as to drop hints, that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more existence than the inhabitants of Utopia.

Indeed I must confess, that as to the people of Lilliput, Brobdingrag, (for so the word should have been spelt, and not, erroneously, Brobdingnag,) and Laputa, I have never yet heard of any Yahoo so presumptuous as to dispute their being, or the facts I have related concerning them; because the truth immediately strikes every reader with conviction. And is there less probability in my account of the Houyhnhnms or Yahoos, when it is manifest, as to the latter, there are so many thousands, even in this country, who only differ from their brother brutes in Houyhnhnm-land because they use a sort of jabber, and do not go naked? I wrote for their amendment, and not their approbation. The united praise of the whole race would be of less consequence to me than the neighing of those two degenerate Houyhnhnms I keep in my stable; because from these, degenerate as they are, I still improve in some virtues, without any mixture of vice.

Do these miserable animals presume to think that I am so degenerated as to defend my veracity?

Yahoo as I am, it is well known through all Houyhnhnm-land, that, by the instructions and example of my illustrious master, I was able, in the compass of two years, (although, I confess, with the utmost difficulty,) to remove that infernal habit of lying, shuffling, deceiving, and equivocating, so deeply rooted in the very souls of all my species, especially the Europeans.

I have other complaints to make upon this vexatious occasion; but I forbear troubling myself or you any farther. I must freely confess, that since my last return, some corruptions of my Yahoo nature have revived in me, by conversing with a few of your species, and particularly those of my own family, by an unavoidable necessity; else I should never have attempted so absurd a project as that of reforming the Yahoo race in this kingdom: but I have now done with all such visionary schemes for

ever.

April 27, 1727.

THE AUTHOR GIVES SOME ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF AND FAMILY.
HIS FIRST INDUCEMENTS TO TRAVEL. HE IS SHIPWRECKED,
AND SWIMS FOR HIS LIFE. GETS SAFE ON SHORE IN THE
COUNTRY OF LILLIPUT. IS MADE A PRISONER, AND CARRIED
UP THE COUNTRY.

M

Y father had a small estate in Nottingham-
shire I was the third of five sons. He
sent me to Emanuel College in Cam-
bridge, at fourteen years old, where I

resided three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon in London, with whom I continued four years: my father now and then sending me small sums of money, I laid them out in learning navigation, and other parts of the mathematics, useful to those who