habit and countenance, and by the shouts of the vulgar, whose thoughts and minds were more disengaged.

At last we entered the palace, and proceeded to 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 startled like one awakened on a 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 afterward 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 I could neither understand nor be understood, I was conducted by his order to an apartment in his palace (this 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 remembered 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

The King of Laputa, as sovereign of a philosophical nation, is fitly introduced by Swift as engaged in scientific inquiries, and in solving problems in the midst of his council, and surrounded by all kinds of mathematical instruments, when an ordinary monarch would be occupied in the discussion of politics, or in the administration of the affairs of his empire. Gulliver waits till the problem is solved, and the king is flapped into the exercise of his sight and hearing. The contempt entertained for Gulliver's understanding because he had his senses sufficiently awake and under his own control to dispense with the assistance of flappers, is a happy stroke of ridicule. Indeed, this conduct has its counterpart in the world, where we often see the weaknesses of human nature enlist the sympathy of mankind, while the absence of them creates even aversion. "The faultless monster that the world ne'er saw" would, it is to be feared, be a very unpopular monster if the world should ever see him.

pudding into a cycloid. The second course was two ducks trussed up in 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 other mathematical figures.*

While we were at dinner, I made bold to ask the names of several things in their language, and those noble persons, by the assistance of their flappers, delighted to give me answers, hoping to raise my admiration of their great abilities, if I could be brought to converse with them. I was soon able to call for bread and drink, or whatever else I wanted.

After dinner my company withdrew, and a person was sent by the king's order, attended by a flapper. He brought with him pens, ink, and paper, and three or four books, giving me to understand, by signs, that he was sent to teach me the language. We sat together four hours, in which time I wrote down a great number of words in columns, with the translations over against them: I likewise made a shift to learn several short sentences; for my tutor would order some of my

The absurd idea of representing all the dishes of food served up at the Laputan dinner as having been cut into mathematical forms is, of course, a sneer at men of science, mathematicians in particular; Swift may also have intended to convey the notion that such men are so devoted to their pursuits that they take them in with their very diet, and, as it were, feed on their favourite occupations. "Swift's technical knowledge," says Professor de Morgan, observing on this passage, "is of a poor kind. According to him beef and mutton were served up in the shape of equilateral triangles, rhomboids, and cycloids. These plane figures have no thickness, and I defy all your readers to produce a mathematician who would be content with mutton of two dimensions. As to the bread, which appeared in cones, cylinders, and parallelograms, the mathematicians would take the cones and cylinders for themselves, and leave the parallelograms for Swift." This criticism seems a little too severe. It cannot be supposed that the Dean was ignorant that besides length and breadth, the third function of depth was necessary in all bodies; nor (if the story that Scott tells, on the authority of Sheridan, be true) that he was not aware that triangles and parallelograms are only superficies, though he does mix them up with solids. He must be taken to have used those terms in a popular (though inaccurate) sense, describing the shape of one superficies, that which is more prominently before the mind, without alluding to that of the others, as people every day speak of a square box, or a circular table. Still, the remark of the critic is just, that, "in satirising mathematicians, Swift ought to have used strict terms, to prevent their being able to show that he was out of his depth." In describing the second course as consisting of dishes cut into the shapes of musical instruments, Swift probably indulged his irony at the expense of musicians, of whom he did not entertain a very high appreciation. Every one remembers his epigram upon the rivalry between the two great masters Handel and Buonocini, whose respective claims to superiority divided the whole musical world in Swift's day-a contest which the Dean contemptuously disposes of in two lines:

"Strange! all this difference should be
'Twixt Tweedle DUM and Tweedle DEE!

servants to fetch something, to turn about, to make a bow, to sit, or to stand or walk, and the like: Then I took down the sentence in writing. He showed me also, in one of the books, the figures of the sun, moon, and stars, the zodiac, the tropics, and polar circles, together with the denominations of many planes and solids. He gave me the names and descriptions of all their musical instruments, and the general terms of art in playing on each of them. After he had left me, I placed all my words, with their interpretations, in alphabetical order. And thus, in a few days, by the help of a very faithful memory, I got some insight into their language.

The word, which I interpret the flying or floating island, is in the original Laputa, whereof I could never learn the true etymology. Lap, in the old obsolete language, signifies high; and untuh, a governor; from which they say, by corruption, was derived Laputa, from Lapuntah. But I do not approve of this derivation, which seems to be a little strained. I ventured to offer to the learned men among them a conjecture of my own, that Laputa was quasi lap outed: lap, signifying properly, the dancing of the sun-beams in the sea; and outed, a wing; which, however, I shall not obtrude, but submit to the judicious reader.*

Those to whom the king had entrusted me, observing how ill I was clad, ordered a tailor to come next morning, and take my measure for a suit of clothes. This operator did his office after a different manner from those of his trade in Europe. He first took my altitude by a quadrant, and then, with rule and compasses, described the dimensions and outlines of my whole body, all which he entered upon paper; and in six days brought my clothes very ill made, and quite out of shape, by happening to make a mistake of a figure in the calculation.† But

• Gulliver's philological disquisition upon the etymology of the word Laputa-both the received derivation amongst the learned men of the island, and that which he suggests to them himself—is a piece of solemn ridicule of the many fanciful conjectures which philologists often hazard as to the derivation of words. It is more than probable Swift had particularly in view the celebrated Dr. Bentley, whose attack upon the "Epistles of Phalaris," some time previously edited by Charles Boyle, afterwards Lord Orrery, offended Sir William Temple, Swift's patron, and brought down on Bentley a severe retaliation from the Dean's bitter genius in the "Battle of the Books." It must be admitted that some of the etymological derivations of Dr. Bentley justly subjected him to the ridicule of Swift; but they are not more extravagant than many of those in which more recent writers have indulged. An abundance of those fanciful roots for words will be found in Horne Tooke's "Diversions of Purley."

In this blunder of the Laputan tailor in his calculations, Swift intended, in the opinion of Sir Walter Scott, to attack Sir Isaac Newton-whom he had not forgiven for his statement

my comfort was, that I observed such accidents very frequent, and little regarded.

During my confinement for want of clothes, and by an indisposition that held me some days longer, I much enlarged my dictionary; and when I next went to court, was able to understand many things the king spoke, and to return him some kind of answers. His majesty had given orders that the island should move north-east and by east, to the vertical point over Lagado, the metropolis of the whole kingdom below, upon the firm earth. It was about ninety leagues distant, and our voyage lasted four days and a half. I was not in the least sensible of the progressive motion made in the air by the island. On the second morning, about eleven o'clock, the king himself in person, attended by his nobility, courtiers, and officers, having prepared all their musical instruments, played on them for three hours, without intermission, so that I was quite stunned with the noise; neither could I possibly guess the meaning, till my tutor informed me. He said that the people of their island had their ears adapted to hear the music of the spheres, which always played at certain periods, and the court was now prepared to bear their part, in whatever instruments they most excelled."

In our journey towards Lagado, the capital city, his majesty ordered that the island should stop over certain towns and villages, from whence he might receive the petitions of his subjects. And to this purpose, several packthreads were let down, with small weights at the bottom. On these packthreads the people strung their petitions, which mounted up directly, like the scraps of paper fastened by schoolboys at the end of the string that holds the kite. Sometimes we received wine and victuals from below, which were drawn up by pulleys.

The knowledge I had in mathematics gave me great assistance in acquiring their phraseology, which depended much upon that science, and music; and in the latter I was not unskilled. Their ideas are perpetually conversant in lines and figures. If they would, for

in relation to Wood's halfpence-for an error in the astronomer's printed computation of the sun's distance from the earth. The error, however, was not Newton's, but his printer's, who inadvertently added a cipher to the astronomer's calculations, and thus increased the distance to an incalculable amount, Newton took care to set himself right before the learned men of Europe by publishing a correction of this typographical error in the Amsterdam Gazette. But Swift either was not aware of the correction, or, what is more likely, took care not to notice it, as it served his purpose better so to do.