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On a small carved wooden stool below the painting stands a dwarf tree scarcely two feet in height. It is a cherry-tree which has been prevented from growing to its full size, but it is a real, living tree, perhaps twenty years old, and exactly like an ordinary cherry-tree, only so small that it might have come from Lilliput. The floor is laid with mats of rice straw with black borders.
The war with Blefuscu had been raging for some years, and the losses by both nations of ships and of men had been very heavy. This war had broken out in the following way. It had always been the custom in Lilliput, as far back as history went, for people when breaking an egg at breakfast to do so at the big end.
Geoffrey wrote an account of the traditionary British kings down to Cadwallader in 689 with as much minuteness and gravity as Swift employed in the Voyage to Lilliput. Other chroniclers declared that Geoffrey lied saucily and shamelessly, but his book became extremely popular. The monks could not then comprehend that the world's greatest literary works were to be products of the imagination.
The empire of Blefuscu is an island situated to the northeast side of Lilliput, from whence it is parted only by a channel of eight hundred yards wide.
When I had got out of danger I stopped a while to pick out the arrows that stuck in my hands and face; and rubbed on some of the ointment that was given me at my first arrival, as I have formerly mentioned. I then took off my spectacles, and, waiting about an hour, till the tide was a little fallen, I waded through the middle with my cargo, and arrived safe at the royal port of Lilliput.
We shall find his pages caustic with wit, satire, and irony, and often disfigured with coarseness. One of the great pessimists of all time, he is yet tremendously in earnest in whatever he says, from his Drapier's Letters, written to protect Ireland from the schemes of English politicians, to his Gulliver's Travels, where he describes the court of Lilliput.
As a result of these Dutch voyages the existence of a great land somewhere to the south-east of Asia became common property to all civilised men. Lilliput, it would thus appear, was situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of the great Bight of Australia.
Swift, from all I can make out, was a far more human and genuine person than he is generally represented, but I do not think I should have liked him, whereas Fielding, I am sure, must have been delightful. Why do the faults of his work overweigh its many great excellences, while the less great excellences of the Voyage to Lilliput outweigh its more serious defects?
In this terrible agitation of mind I could not forbear thinking of Lilliput, whose inhabitants looked upon me as the greatest prodigy that ever appeared in the world; where I was able to draw an imperial fleet in my hand, and perform those other actions which will be recorded forever in the chronicles of that empire, while posterity shall hardly believe them, although attested by millions.
On another occasion, not long afterward, I was hurriedly loading my gun in the October woods in hopes of overtaking a gray squirrel that was fast escaping through the treetops, when one of these lilliput frogs, the color of the fast-yellowing leaves, leaped near me. I saw him only out of the corner of my eye and yet bagged him, because I had already made him my own.
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