disposition to philosophise upon this phenomenon, I rather chose to observe what course the island would take, because it seemed for a while to stand still. Yet soon after, it advanced nearer, and I could see the sides of it encompassed with several gradations of galleries, and stairs, at certain intervals, to descend from one to the other. In the lowest gallery, I beheld some people fishing with long angling-rods, and others looking on. I waved my cap (for my hat was long since worn out) and my handkerchief towards the island; and upon its nearer approach, I called and shouted with the utmost strength of my voice; and then looking circumspectly, I beheld a crowd gathered to that side which was most in my view. I found by their pointing towards me and to each other, that they plainly discovered me, although they made no return for my shouting. But I could see four or five men running in great haste up the stairs, to the top of the island, who then disappeared. I happened rightly to conjecture that these were sent for orders, to some person in authority, upon this occasion.

Taken up into the island

At last we entered the palace, and proceeded into the chamber of presence, where I saw the king seated on his throne, attended on each side by persons of prime quality. Before the throne was a large table filled with globes and spheres, and mathematical instruments of all kinds. His majesty took not the least notice of us, although our entrance was not without sufficient noise, by the concourse of all persons belonging to the court. But he was then deep in a problem; and we attended at least an hour before he could solve it. There stood by him on each side a young page with flaps in their hands, and when they saw he was at leisure, one of them gently struck his mouth, and the other his right ear; at which he started like one awaked on the sudden, and looking towards me and the company I was in, recollected the occasion of our coming, whereof he had been informed before. He spoke some words, whereupon immediately a young man with a flap came up to my side, and flapped me gently on the right ear; but I made signs, as well as I could, that I had no occasion for such an instrument; which, as I afterwards found, gave his majesty, and the whole court, a very mean opinion of my understanding. The king, as far as I could conjecture, asked me several questions, and I addressed myself to him in all the languages I had. When it was found that I could neither understand nor be understood, I was conducted by the king's order to an apartment in his palace (the prince being distinguished above all his predecessors for his hospitality to strangers), where two servants were appointed to attend me. My dinner was brought, and four persons of quality, whom I remember to have seen very near the king's person, did me the honour to dine with me. We had two courses, of three dishes each. In the first course, there was a shoulder of mutton cut into an equilateral triangle, a piece of beef into a rhomboid, and a pudding into a cycloid. The second course was two ducks trussed into the form of fiddles; sausages and puddings resembling flutes and hautboys; and a breast of veal in the shape of a harp. The servants cut our bread into cones, cylinders, parallelograms, and several other mathematical figures.

up

Here is the description of the flying island:

The flying or floating island is exactly circular, its diameter 7,837 yards, or about four miles and a half, and consequently

contains ten thousand acres. It is three hundred yards thick. The bottom, or under surface, which appears to those who view it below, is one even regular plate of adamant, shooting up to the height of above two hundred yards. Above it lie the several minerals in their usual order, and over all is a coat of rich mould, ten or twelve feet deep. This declivity of the upper surface, from the circumference to the centre, is the natural cause why all the dews and rains which fall upon the island are conveyed in small rivulets towards the middle, where they are emptied into four large basins, each of about half a mile in circuit, and two hundred yards distant from the centre. From these basins the water is continually exhaled by the sun in the day-time, which effectually prevents their overflowing. Besides, as it is in the power of the monarch to raise the island above the region of clouds and vapours, he can prevent the falling of dews and rains whenever he pleases. For the highest clouds cannot rise above two miles, as naturalists agree; at least they were never known to do in that country.

At the centre of the island there is a chasm, about fifty yards in diameter, from whence the astronomers descend into a large dome, which is therefore called flandona gagnole, or the astronomer's cave, situated at the depth of a hundred yards beneath the upper surface of the adamant. In this cave are twenty lamps continually burning, which, from the reflection of the adamant, cast a strong light into every part. The place is stored with great variety of sextants, quadrants, telescopes, astrolabes, and other astronomical instruments. But the greatest curiosity, upon which the fate of the island depends, is a loadstone of a prodigious size, in shape resembling a weaver's shuttle. It is in length six yards, and in the thickest part at least three yards over. This magnet is sustained by a very strong axle of adamant passing through its middle, upon which it plays, and is poised so exactly, that the weakest hand can turn it. It is hooped round with a hollow cylin der of adamant, four feet deep, as many thick, and twelve yards in diameter, placed horizontally, and supported by eight adamantine feet, each six yards high. In the middle of the concave side, there is a groove twelve inches deep, in which the extremities of the axle are lodged, and turned round as there is occasion.

The stone cannot be moved from its place by any force, because the hoop and its feet are one continued piece with that body of adamant which constitutes the bottom of the island.

By means of this loadstone, the island is made to rise and fall, and move from one place to another. For, with respect to that part of the earth over which the monarch presides, the stone is endued at one of its sides with an attractive power, and at the other with a repulsive. Upon placing the magnet erect, with its attracting end towards the earth, the island descends; but when the repelling extremity points downwards, the island mounts directly upwards. When the position of the stone is oblique, the motion of the island is so too; for, in this magnet, the forces always act in lines parallel to its direction.

By this oblique motion, the island is conveyed to different parts of the monarch's dominions. To explain the manner of its progress, let A B represent a line drawn across the dominions of Balnibarbi, let the line c d represent the loadstone, of which let d be the repelling end, and e the attracting end, the island being over C: let the stone be placed in the position ed, with its repelling end downwards; then the island will be driven upwards obliquely towards D. When it is arrived at D, let the stone be turned upon its axle till its attracting end points towards E, and then the island will be carried obliquely towards E; where, if the stone be again turned upon its

axle till it stands in the position E F, with its repelling point downwards, the island will rise obliquely towards F, where, by directing the attracting end towards G, the island may be

Laputa. D

BALNIBARBI

Lagulo

Malonada

THE FLYING ISLAND. (From "Gulliver's Travels," 1726.)

carried to G, and from G to H, by turning the stone, so as to make its repelling extremity point directly downward. And thus, by changing the situation of the stone, as often as there is occasion, the island is made to rise and fall by turns in an oblique direction, and by those alternate risings and fallings (the obliquity being not considerable) is conveyed from one part of the dominions to the other.

But it must be observed, that this island cannot move beyond the extent of the dominions below, nor can it rise above the height of four miles. For which, the astronomers (who have written large systems concerning the stone) assign the following reason: that the magnetic virtue does not extend beyond the distance of four miles, and that the mineral, which acts upon the stone in the bowels of the earth, and in the sea about six leagues distant from the shore, is not diffused through the whole globe, but terminated with the limits of the king's dominions; and it was easy, from the great advantage of such a superior situation, for a prince to bring under his obedience whatever country lay within the attraction of that magnet.

When the stone is put parallel to the plane of the horizon, the island standeth still; for in that case, the extremities of it, being at equal distance from the earth, act with equal force, the one in drawing downwards, and the other in pushing upwards, and consequently no motion can ensue.

This loadstone is under the care of certain astronomers, who, from time to time, give it such positions as the monarch directs.

Many important experiments were on foot in the Academy of Lagado, the capital of Balnibarbi:

This academy is not an entire single building, but a continuation of several houses on both sides of a street, which growing waste, was purchased, and applied to that use.

I was received very kindly by the warden, and went for many days to the academy. Every room hath in it one or

more projectors; and I believe I could not be in fewer than five hundred rooms.

The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin were all of the same colour. He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me he did not doubt, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me "to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers." I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them.

I saw another at work to calcine ice into gunpowder; who likewise shewed me a treatise he had written concerning the malleability of fire, which he intended to publish.

There was a most ingenious architect, who had contrived a new method for building houses, by beginning at the roof, and working downwards to the foundation; which he justified to me by the like practice of those two prudent insects, the bee and the spider.

There was a man born blind, who had several apprentices in his own condition: their employment was to mix colours for painters, which their master taught them to distinguish, by feeling and smelling. It was indeed my misfortune to find them at that time not very perfect in their lessons, and the professor himself happened to be generally mistaken. This artist is much encouraged and esteemed by the whole fraternity.

A learned professor of Lagado had invented a book-making machine.

The first professor I saw was in a very large room, with forty pupils about him. After salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a frame, which took up the greatest part of both the length and breadth of the room, he said, perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge, by practical and mechanical operations. But the world would soon be sensible of its usefulness; and he flattered himself that a more noble, exalted: thought never sprang in any other man's head. Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, may write both in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study. He then led me to the frame, about the sides whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was The twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. superficies was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions, but without any order. The professor then desired me to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work. The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads to read the several lines softly, as

they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times; and, at every turn, the engine was so contrived that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labour; and the professor showed me several volumes in large folio, already collected, of broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and, out of those rich materials, to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences; which, however, might be still improved and much expedited, if the public would raise a fund for making and employing five hundred such frames in Lagado, and oblige the managers to contribute in common their several collections.

He assured me that this invention had employed all his thoughts from his youth; that he had employed the whole vocabulary into his frame, and made the strictest computation of the general proportion there is in the book between the numbers of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of speech.

I made my humblest acknowledgment to this illustrious person, for his great communicativeness; and promised, if ever I had the good fortune to return to my native country, that I would do him justice, as the sole inventor of this wonderful machine: the form and contrivance of which I desired leave to delineate upon paper, as in the figure here annexed. I told him, although it were the custom of our

people here were served by ghosts of the dead, and Gulliver had leave to ask for a sight of any of the dead in whom he might feel interested. "I saw," he says, "Cæsar and Pompey at the head of their troops, just ready to engage. I saw the former in the last great triumph. I desired that the Senate of Rome might appear before me in one large chamber, and a modern representative in counterview in another. The first seemed to be an assembly of heroes and demi-gods; the other, a knot of pedlars, pickpockets, highwaymen, and bullies." By this invention Swift carried nearer home his satireon the littleness of men whose deeds made a large part of modern history. The satire is deepening into scorn of the corruptions of society, as Lemuel Gulliver is drawing his records of travel to a close.

I was chiefly disgusted with modern history. For having strictly examined all the persons of greatest name in the courts of princes, for a hundred years past, I found how the world had been misled by interested writers, to ascribe the greatest exploits in war to cowards; the wisest counsel to fools; sincerity to flatterers; Roman virtue to betrayers of their country; piety to atheists; truth to informers: how many innocent and excellent persons had been condemned to death or banishment, by the practising of great ministers upon the corruption of judges, and the malice of factions: how many villains had been exalted to the highest places of trust, power, dignity, and profit: how great a share in the motions and events of courts, councils, and senates, might be challenged by parasites and buffoons. How low an opinion I had of human wisdom and integrity, when I was truly informed of the springs and motives of great enterprises and revolutions in the world, and of the contemptible accidents to which they owed their success!

Here I discovered the roguery and ignorance of those who pretend to write anecdotes, or secret history; who send somany kings to their graves with a cup of poison; will repeat the discourse between a prince and chief minister, when no witness was by; unlock the thoughts and cabinets of ambassadors and secretaries of state; and have the perpetual misfortune to be mistaken. Here I discovered the secret causes. of many great events that have surprised the world; how a bad woman can govern the back-stairs, the back-stairs a council, and the council a senate. A general confessed, in my presence, that he got a victory purely by the force of cowardice and ill-conduct; and an admiral, that for want of proper intelligence, he beat the enemy, to whom he intended to betray the fleet. Three kings protested to me, that in their whole reigns they never did once prefer any person of merit, unless by mistake, or treachery of some minister in whom they confided; neither would they do it if they were to live again: and they shewed, with great strength of reason, that the royal throne could not be supported without corruption, because that positive, confident, restive temper, which virtue infused into man, was a perpetual clog to public business.

I had the curiosity to inquire, in a particular manner, by what method great numbers had procured to themselves high titles of honour, and prodigious estates, and I confined my inquiry to a very modern period; however, without grating upon present times because I would be sure to give no offence even to foreigners; for I hope the reader need not be told, that I do not in the least intend my own country, in what I say upon this occasion. A great number of persons concerned were called up; and upon a very slight examination dis

covered such a scene of infamy, that I cannot reflect upon it without some seriousness. Perjury, oppression, subornation, fraud, pandarism, and the like infirmities, were amongst the most excusable arts they had to mention; and for these I gave, as it was reasonable, great allowance. But when some confessed they owed their greatness and wealth to the betraying of their country or their prince; some, to poisoning; more, to the perverting of justice, in order to destroy the innocent; I hope I may be pardoned, if these discoveries inclined me a little to abate of that profound veneration which I am naturally apt to pay to persons of high rank, who ought to be treated with the utmost respect due to their sublime dignity, by us their inferiors.

I had often read of some great services done to princes and states, and desired to see the persons by whom those services were performed. Upon inquiry I was told, that their names were to be found on no record, except a few of them, whom history hath represented as the vilest of rogues and traitors. As to the rest, I had never once heard of them. They ali appeared with dejected looks, and in the meanest habit; most of them telling me, they died in poverty and disgrace, and the rest on a scaffold or on a gibbet.

His next visit was to Luggnagg, where the bitterest satire lies in a picture of the sordid wretchedness of the Struldbrugs or immortals, men whose old age is prolonged for ever. From Lugg nagg, Gulliver found a passage to Japan, whence he returned by a Dutch ship to Amsterdam, and from Amsterdam to England.

His next and last voyage brought Captain Gulliver into the country of the Houyhnhnms. His crew had mutinied and put him ashore on a strange land. His adventures there form the climax to his satire on human society in its low state of civilisation. Though we have made some little advances since 1726 we are, as a race of men in Europe, certainly not half civilised yet. Swift ended his satire by imagining a land in which the noblest of the brutes -the horse-is the rational being, and man is a brute beast. The horses, Houyhnhnms, simple, kindly, ignorant of untruth, or of the animal excesses, luxuries, and vanities of "civilised" man, kept in subjection a race of vile animals, Yahoos, men absolute in their brutality. Discourse with an enlightened Houyhnhnm did not succeed in showing that the civilised Yahoos, from among whom Gulliver came, had made any great advance out of the depravity of their brute nature.

He asked me, what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to war with another. I answered, they were innumerable; but I should only mention a few of the chief. Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their master in a war, in order to stifle, or divert, the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration. Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire; what is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red, or grey; and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean, with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance, as those

occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.

"Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretend to any right. Sometimes one prince quarrelleth with another, for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a war is entered upon because the enemy is too strong; and sometimes, because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things which we have, or have the things which we want, and we both fight, till they take ours, or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable cause of war, to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence, or embroiled by factions among themselves. It is justifiable to enter into war against our nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a territory of land, that would render our dominions round and complete. If a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death, and make slaves of the rest, in order to civilise and reduce them from their barbarous way of living. It is a very kingly, honourable, and frequent practice, when one prince desires the assistance of another to secure him against an invasion, that the assistant, when he has driven out the invader, should seize on the dominions himself, and kill, imprison, or banish the prince he came to relieve. Alliance by blood or marriage is a frequent cause of war between princes; and the nearer the kindred is, the greater their disposition to quarrel. Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance. For these reasons, the trade of a soldier is held the most honourable of all others, because a soldier is a Yahoo, hired to kill, in cold blood, as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.

"There are likewise another kind of princes in Europe, not able to make war by themselves, who hire out their troops to richer nations for so much a day to each man; of which they keep three fourths to themselves, and it is the best part of their maintenance: such are those in many northern parts of Europe."

"What you have told me," said my master, "upon the subject of war, does indeed discover most admirably the effects of that reason you pretend to; however, it is happy that the shame is greater than the danger; and that nature hath left you utterly incapable of doing much mischief. For, your mouths lying flat with your faces, you can hardly bite each other to any purpose, unless by consent. Then, as to the claws upon your feet before and behind, they are so short and tender that one of our Yahoos would drive a dozen of yours before him. And therefore in recounting the numbers of those who have been killed in battle, I cannot but think you have said the thing which is not."

I could not forbear shaking my head, and smiling a little at his ignorance. And being no stranger to the art of war, I gave him a description of cannons, culverins, muskets, carbines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, sea-fights, ships sunk with a thousand men, twenty thousand killed on each side, dying groans, limbs flying in the air, smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horses' feet, flight, pursuit, victory; fields strewed with carcases left for food to dogs and wolves and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning and destroying. And to set forth the valour of my own dear countrymen, I assured him that I had seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship; and beheld the dead bodies come down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of the spectators.

I was going on to more particulars, when my master commanded me silence. He said, whoever understood the nature of Yahoos, might easily believe it possible for so vile an animal to be capable of every action I had named, if their strength and cunning equalled their malice. But as my discourse had increased his abhorrence of the whole species, so he found it gave him a disturbance in his mind, to which he was wholly a stranger before. He thought his ears, being used to such abominable words, might by degrees admit them with less detestation: that although he hated the Yahoos of this country, yet he no more blamed them for their odious qualities, than he did a gnnayh (a bird of prey) for its cruelty, or a sharp stone for cutting his hoof. But when a creature pretending to reason could be capable of such enormities, he dreaded lest the corruption of that faculty might be worse than brutality itself. He seemed therefore confident that, instead of reason, we were only possessed of some quality fitted to increase our natural vices; as the reflection from a troubled stream returns the image of an ill-shapen body, not only larger, but more distorted.

He added, that he had heard too much upon the subject of war, both in this and some former discourses. There was another point which a little perplexed him at present. I had informed him that some of our crew left their country on account of being ruined by law; that I had already explained the meaning of the word, but he was at a loss how it should come to pass that the law, which was intended for every man's preservation, should be any man's ruin. Therefore he desired to be further satisfied what I meant by law, and what sort of dispensers thereof it could be by whose practices the property of any person could be lost instead of being preserved. He added, he saw not what great occasion there could be for this thing called law, since all the intentions and purposes of it may be fully answered by following the dictates of nature and reason, which are sufficient guides for a reasonable animal, as we pretended to be, in showing us what we ought to do and what to avoid.

So the satire passes on to the injustice in our law; the unreason in appetite that fills our bodies with disease; the pretences of the doctors; the tricks of ministers. With these are contrasted the simple virtues of the Houyhnhnms, the chief of these being "friendship and benevolence . . . and these not contined to particular objects, but universal to the whole race." Swift said of himself that he liked Jack and Tom individually, but hated mankind as a whole. That he did like his friends, and that he was kind to the poor about him, we. know; the kindliness is in his book and wins our children, notwithstanding all its bitter dealing with the untruth and unkindness, the turmoil about empty trifles and the evil set up for a good, that fills too large a part of human life. Swift's power of intellect gave prominence to his book, but his was only one of many voices, gathering year by year in number and force, that were leading on the thoughts of men to a great struggle for a higher life. In another quarter of a century Rousseau was arguing that men only misused their brains, and that civilised man had sunk below the savage; and a young forerunner of the revolutionary struggle wrote of the world he lived in, "If a sage descended from heaven, and in his conduct consulted only the light of reason, he would universally pass for a fool."

CHAPTER X.

RICHARDSON'S "CLARISSA HARLOWE." SAMUEL RICHARDSON 1 was fifty-nine years old in the year 1748, when he produced "Clarissa Harlowe," the second and the best of his three novels. His first novel, "Pamela," had been published in 1740. In it he had given to a servant-girl the name of one of the princesses in Sidney's "Arcadia," for the purpose of showing that the sorrows and trials of the humblest, if told simply and faithfully, come home to all. The high-flown romances of the French school had already ceased to please. If" Robinson Crusoe " and the other stories by Defoe did not profess to be romances, they certainly were books of life and adventure, in which the imagination of a man of genius worked its spells without the figuring of sceptres, crowns, or shepherds' crooks, but by caring about life as it is.

The faults of sentiment in Richardson's history of Pamela Andrewes set Henry Fielding to work on a playful history of another member of the family,

Joseph Andrewes," and so caused our greatest novelist to find his strength. We are only the more obliged to Samuel Richardson for that, though Richardson was not grateful to Fielding, for he was a worthy gentleman who could not understand a laugh against himself. Whatever the faults of his first novel, it found many readers. At a time when the interest of men in the real problems of life was deepening, "Pamela" brought the realism of Defoe into the novel proper. It is true that there was something improper in what good Mr. Richardson would have considered its propriety; but with his "Pamela" Richardson did carry the novel fairly over from the conventional, or fashionable, to the national side of English literature. He also stirred the energies of a stronger man than himself, who helped to keep it there. If Fielding laughed at "Pamela," he did not laugh at "Clarissa Harlowe.". It was Richardson's masterpiece, and it was followed in the next year, 1749, by Fielding's masterpiece, "Tom Jones." "Roderick Random," the first novel of Tobias Smollett, appeared in the same year as "Clarissa," Smollett's age being in that year twenty-seven, Fielding's age forty-one, and Richardson's, as before said, fifty-nine.

Richardson's three novels represent life in three social grades. Pamela was a servant, Clarissa belonged to the middle class, and "Sir Charles Grandison”—the third novel, published in 1753-was designed to represent what those times called a "person of quality." Forasmuch as the fascinating hero in "Clarissa" was a scoundrel, admired by ladies who read the book because, as they told the author, he had given them no other hero to admire, Richardson deliberately set himself to paint in another book a hero upon whom ladies might dote judiciously.

The eight volumes of "Clarissa" were all needed to produce the great effect which is undoubtedly produced upon the mind of any reader who will go steadily through them. Fielding writes every

1 See in this Library "Shorter Prose Works," pp. 288-299.