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Updated: May 11, 2025
We listened with glowing cheeks to Robinson Crusoe and the Arabian Nights, Gulliver's Travels and Don Quixote, both arranged for children, the pretty, stories of Nieritz and others, descriptions of Nature and travel, and Grimm's fairy tales. On other winter evenings my mother this will surprise many in the case of so sensible a woman took us to the theatre.
Gulliver's Travels. It is the edition in Temple Classics for Young People that is recommended, not that in the Temple Classics. SWIFT'S wit makes us laugh, but it leaves us on the whole, perhaps, a little sad. Now we come to a satirist of quite another spirit whose wit, it has been said, "makes us laugh and leaves us good and happy."* *Thackeray. Joseph Addison was the son of a Dean.
This great officer to the end was Gulliver's bitter enemy, and though on this occasion he was out-voted, yet he was allowed to draw up the conditions which Gulliver was to sign before his chains were struck off. The conditions were: First, that he was not to quit the country without leave granted under the King's Great Seal.
Here, likewise, were Gulliver's Travels, and a variety of little gilt-covered children's books, such as Tom Thumb, Jack the Giant Queller, Mother Goose's Melodies, and others which our great-grandparents used to read in their childhood. And here were sermons for the pious, and pamphlets for the politicians, and ballads, some merry and some dismal ones, for the country people to sing.
And as for Gulliver himself, they believed that he had fallen from the moon, or from one of the stars; it was impossible, they said, that so big a race of men could live on the earth. It was quite certain that there could not be food enough for them. They did not believe Gulliver's story. He must have fallen from the moon!
Soon another small man, who from his brilliant uniform seemed to be an officer of very high rank, marched with some others on to Gulliver's chest and held up to his eyes a paper which Gulliver understood to be an order from the King of the country. Gulliver asked, by signs, that his bonds might be loosed.
Ben wrote it to prove that he was an honest man, a mirror of all the virtues, an injured innocent; the world, reading it, hails him respectfully as the noblest, the boldest, the gaudiest liar that ever lived. Again, turn to "Gulliver's Travels." The thing was planned by its rev. author as a devastating satire, a terrible piece of cynicism; it survives as a story-book for sucklings.
The story of Jonathan Swift and of the two women who gave their lives for love of him is familiar to every student of English literature. Swift himself, both in letters and in politics, stands out a conspicuous figure in the reigns of King William III and Queen Anne. By writing Gulliver's Travels he made himself immortal.
The world is obliged to M. de Calonne for the pains he has taken to refute the scandalous exaggerations relative to some of the royal expenses, and to detect the fallacious account given of pensions, for the wicked purpose of provoking the populace to all sorts of crimes. See Gulliver's Travels for the idea of countries governed by philosophers.
Lloyd showed himself, Brownie's nose would be snuffing at his coat pockets for the bit of apple or lump of sugar that rarely failed to be there. As for his bearing toward Bert, it showed such affection, obedience, and intelligence, that it is not to be wondered at, if the boy sometimes asked himself if the "Houyhnhnms" of Gulliver's Travels had not their counterpart in nature, after all.
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