Gulliver's Travels [antikvár]

EDITOR'S NOTE Dean Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin, had written many books on many subjects, and preached many sermons, before he wrote " Gulliver's Travels." The book appeared first in the year 1726, when he was a man of sober age. Only a few of his friends, poets and wits—Pope and Gay and Bolingbroke—knew at first that he was the author of this strange history of travels into strange regions, a work that was a romance and a fairy-tale, a satire and a sermon, all packed into one cover. If you ask how he ever came to write such a book, you must go back to the time of his boyhood, when he was poor and proud, and given to think of the many things he would like to do if he had his own way when he was a man. Although his sharp wit and desperate pen made him feared by other men, he never quite had his own way, however, unless it was in the imaginary world of Gulliver. And even this, like other fanciful places, was partly a picture of a real world, English and Irish. So the story of the monkey who carried off Gulliver and left him on the ridge-tile is taken from the story of an ape that once carried off a babe who became ancestor to the earls of Kildare. This ape, it is said, took the babe from the cradle, and carried him to the steeple-top of the great church of Tralee. Hence the two monkeys on the crest of the family, now merged in that of the Duke of Leinster. It may seem that his fellow-men sometimes seemed to Swift too much like apes, or like horses ; but at heart he must have loved them much to have so often laid the lash on them for their own good. Swift, when first considering the scheme of " Gulliver's Travels," spoke of it as taking the form of " very extraordinary