of whatever prosperity we have since erected, are laid in the disinterested and magnanimous patriotism of Swift."*

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS.

In his retirement with Stella and Mrs. Dingley, a country house belonging to Dr. Sheridan, about seven miles from Kells, Swift occupied himself in finishing, correcting, amending, and transcribing Gulliver's Travels, to be published, he intimated, so soon as he could find a printer courageous enough to venture his ears. He admitted Sheridan to this secret labour; but when Tickell expressed curiosity to see the treatise on which he was at work, he frankly informed him, that it totally disagreed with his notions of persons and things, and, as if conscious of writing to a Secretary of State, he adds, it would be impossible for Mr. Tickell to find his treasury of waste papers without searching nine houses, and then sending to him for the key. Having completed this celebrated work, the Dean resolved, for the first time since the death of Queen Anne, to revisit England, a purpose which he accomplished in spring, 1726.

Bolingbroke, now returned from his exile, Pope, Arbuthnot, Gay, Bathurst, and other old friends, received him with open arms, and with the melancholy pleasure of sailors who meet after a shipwreck, from which they have escaped by different

means.

In July, the Dean received letters informing him that Stella was in a rapid decline. Swift hastened to Ireland, was there received with all honours; bells were rung, bonfires kindled, and a body of the most respectable citizens escorted their patriot in a sort of triumphal procession from the shore to the Deanery. But he was yet more gratified by finding that Mrs. Johnson was in part recovered, though not to health or strength.

The celebrated Travels of Gulliver were now given to the world, but under the mystery which almost always shadowed Swift's publications. Swift left England in the month of August, and about the same time Motte the bookseller received the manuscript, dropped, he said, at his house in the dark, from a hackney-coach. The work appeared in November following, with several retrenchments and alterations, owing

* The tract here quoted is now known to have been an early produc tion of the Right Honourable J. W. Croker.

to the timidity of the printer. This extraordinary satirical romance was instantly read from the highest to the lowest; and from the cabinet-council to the nursery. The world was frantic to discover the author; and even his friends, Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, and others, wrote to Swift, as if they were in doubt on the subject; yet this was feigned, for all his literary brotherhood were more or less acquainted with the work before it was published.

Immediately on the publication, Arbuthnot wrote to Swift as the author, "I will make over all my profits to you for the property of Gulliver's Travels, which I believe will have as great a run as John Bunyan.”

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Sir Walter Scott has given this admirable précis of the Travels. "Perhaps no work ever exhibited such general attractions to all classes. It offered personal and political satire to the readers in high life, low and coarse incident to the vulgar, marvels to the romantic, wit to the young and lively, lessons of morality and policy to the grave, and maxims of deep and bitter misanthropy to neglected age, and disappointed ambition. The plan of the satire varies in the different parts. The voyage to Lilliput refers chiefly to the court and politics of England, and Sir Robert Walpole is plainly intimated under the character of the Premier Flimnap, which he afterwards probably remembered to the prejudice of the Dean's view of leaving Ireland. The factions of High-Heels and Low-Heels express the factions of Tories and Whigs; the Small-Endians and Big-Endians, the religious divisions of Papist and Protestant. Blefescu is France, and the ingratitude of the Lilliputian court, which forces Gulliver to take shelter there, rather than have his eyes put out, is an indirect reproach upon that of England, and a vindication of the flight of Ormond and Bolingbroke to Paris. Many other allusions may be traced by those well acquainted with the secret history of the reign of George I. The scandal which Gulliver gave to the empress, by his mode of extinguishing the flames in the royal palace, seems to intimate the author's own disgrace with Queen Anne, through the indecorum of the Tale of a Tub."

In the Voyage to Brobdingnag, the satire is of a more general character. A very happy effect is produced by turning the telescope, and painting Gulliver, who had formerly been a giant among the Lilliputians, as a pigmy amidst this tremendous race. Some passages of the court of Brobdingnag were supposed to be intended as an affront upon the maids of

honour, for whom Swift had very little respect. The Voyage to Laputa is a ridicule of the Royal Society; and an occasional shaft is levelled at Sir Isaac Newton: its satire of projectors is withering. The Voyage to the Land of the Houyhnhnms is a fierce diatribe upon human nature, and the Yahoos are odious and hateful.

Scott next has judiciously observed how exact in this wonderful satire is the adaptation of the narrative to the condition of the supposed author. He says:

"The character of the imaginary traveller is exactly that of Dampier, or any other sturdy nautical wanderer of the period, endowed with courage and common sense, who sailed through distant seas, without losing a single English prejudice which he had brought from Portsmouth or Plymouth, and on his return gave a grave and simple narrative of what he had seen or heard in foreign countries. The character is perhaps strictly English, and can be hardly relished by a foreigner. The reflections and observations of Gulliver are never more refined or deeper than might be expected from a plain master of a merchantman, or surgeon in the Old Jewry; and there was such a reality given to this person, that one seaman is said to have sworn he knew Captain Gulliver very well, but he lived at Wapping, not at Rotherhithe. (Gulliver, so Swift tells us, was long an inhabitant of the place. It was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoken it,' was a sort of proverb among his neighbours at Redriff.) It is the contrast between the natural ease and simplicity of such a style, and the marvels which the volume contains, that forms one great charm of this memorable satire on the imperfections, follies, and vices of mankind."

Scott then commends the exact calculations and preservation of proportions which qualify the extravagance of the fable; adding, "in this point of view, perhaps, the highest praise that could have been bestowed on Gulliver's Travels was the censure of a learned Irish prelate, who said the book contained some things which he could not prevail upon himself to believe."

Professor de Morgan, however, shows the former portion of Scott's commendation to be unmerited. In a communication to Notes and Queries, 2nd Series, No. 137, he affirms that Swift was not much given to arithmetic, and that he was most likely assisted, in this portion of the Travels, by Arbuthnot; although he attacked the mathematicians, his own technical knowledge was of a poor kind; and Mr. de Morgan concludes by observing: "that Swift could himself extract a cube root, or use logarithms, is more than Apella would have believed, even after twenty years' service in the marines." The entire paper is very piquant and to the purpose, but too long for quotation here.

Lord Macaulay has this note upon the originality of the Travels: "Swift boasted that he was never known to steal a hint; and he certainly owed as little to his predecessors as any modern writer. Yet we cannot help suspecting that he borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, one of the happiest touches in his Voyage to Lilliput from four Latin lines written by Addison above thirty years before Gulliver's Travels appeared. The passage is: "The Emperor is taller by about the breadth of my nail than any of his court, which alone is enough to strike an awe into the beholders."

Gulliver's Travels sold with such rapidity, that the whole impression was exhausted in a week. Pope went to London on purpose to see how it would be received by statesmen and commoners; and to observe its effects was, he says, his diversion for a fortnight. He had a peculiar interest in the work.

In a letter to Pulteney, 12th May, 1735, the Dean says, "I never got a farthing for anything I writ except once about eight years ago, and that by Mr. Pope's prudent management for me.' This probably alludes to Gulliver's Travels, for which Pope certainly obtained from the bookseller 3007. There may, however, be some question, whether this sum was not left at Pope's disposal as well as that which he got for the Miscellanies (1507.), and which Swift abandoned to him."-(Scott's Life of Swift.) Motte, the publisher of the Miscellanies, in a letter to Swift, says, "I am a stranger to what part of the copy-money he [Pope] received, but you, who know better, are a competent judge whether he deserved it."

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The secret of the authorship of the work was kept up by Swift by alluding to a book sent to him called Gulliver's Travels. A bishop here," he adds, "said that the book was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it." Arbuthnot writes him-"Lord Scarborough, who is no inventor of stories, told us that he fell in company with a master of a ship, who told him that he was very well acquainted with Gulliver, but that the printer had mistaken; that he lived in Wapping, not in Rotherhithe. I lent the book to an old gentleman, who went immediately to his map, to search for Lilliput."* It is obvious how much all this must have amused the Dean and his friends in connexion with the unexampled sale of the volume.

* Rogers notes: "When I was at Banbury, I happened to observe in the churchyard several inscriptions to the memory of persons named Gulliver; and on my return home, looking into Gulliver's Travels, I found, to my surprise, that the said inscriptions are mentioned there as a confirmation of Mr. Gulliver's statement, that his family came from Oxfordshire.' "-Table Talk, p. 257.

1

BARGAINING WITH THE PUBLISHERS.

Mr. Carruthers, of Inverness, could find no authority for the statement of 300l. for the Gulliver copyright, nor does it appear that Pope was connected with the mystification that accompanied the publication. Erasmus Lewis was the negotiator, and the sum demanded for the copyright was only 2007. The manuscript was sent to Motte, Swift's publisher, with a request that he should immediately, on undertaking the publication, deliver a bank-bill of 2007. Motte demurred to the immediate payment, but offered to publish the work within a month after he received the copy; and to pay the sum demanded, if the success would allow it, in six months. His terms were apparently accepted, for Gulliver reappeared in the latter end of October or beginning of November, 1726. At the expiration of the six months, Motte seems to have applied for a longer period of credit. Swift's answer is characteristic:

"Mr. Motte, I send this enclosed by a friend, to be sent to you, to desire that you would go to the house of Erasmus Lewis, Cork-street, behind Burlington House, and let him know that you are come from me; for to the said Mr. Lewis I have given full power to treat concerning my cousin Gulliver's book, and whatever he and you shall settle I will consent to, &c.-Richard Sympson."

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This is in Swift's handwriting, very slightly disguised. The engagement was closed in about a week afterwards, as appears from a memorandum on the same sheet: London, May 4th, 1727, I am fully satisfied,-E. Lewis." These documents with others were first published in 1840, by Dr. Cooke Taylor, in an illustrated edition of Gulliver: the originals are in the possession of the Rev. C. Bathurst Woodman, grandson of Mr. Bathurst the publisher, who began his career in partnership with Motte. Pope does not appear in the transaction.

Motte also published the Miscellanies,* and by this work Swift received no pecuniary advantage. From documents in Mr. Woodman's possession it appears that the copyright money was divided between Pope, Arbuthnot, Gay,

* Motte's imprint in vol. iii. of the Miscellanies is "at the Middle Temple Gate ;" it was within the gate, or No. 6, Fleet-street, and was subsequently occupied by a tinman and brazier. We remember a bookseller's within the gate of Gray's Inn, in Gray's Inn-lane; and to this day there is a shop within the Holborn gate of Gray's Inn.