had the honour to be ambassador from his majesty, and found the natives in both these kingdoms very hard to believe that the fact was possible and it appeared from my astonishment when he first mentioned the matter to me, that I received it as a thing wholly new, and scarcely to be credited. That in the two kingdoms above-mentioned, where during his residence he had conversed very much, he observed long life to be the universal desire and wish of mankind. That whoever had one foot in the grave was sure to hold back the other as strongly as he could. That the oldest had still hopes of living one day longer, and looked on death as the greatest evil, from which nature always prompted him to retreat. Only in this island of Luggnagg the appetite for living was not so eager, from the continual example of the struldbrugs before their eyes.

"That the system of living contrived by me was unreasonable and unjust; because it supposed a perpetuity of youth, health, and vigour, which no man could be so foolish to hope, however extravagant he may be in his wishes.* That the question therefore was not whether a man would choose to be always in the prime of youth, attended with prosperity and health; but how he would pass a perpetual life, under all the usual disadvantages which old age brings along with it; for although few men will avow their desires of being immortal, upon such hard conditions, yet in the two kingdoms before-mentioned, of Balnibarbi and Japan, he observed that every man desired to put off death some time longer, let it approach ever so late: and he rarely heard of any man who died willingly, except he were incited by the extremity of grief or torture. And he appealed to me, whether in those countries I had travelled, as well as my own, I had not observed the same general disposition." †

"To this it may possibly be objected, that the perpetuity of youth, health, and vigour would be less a prodigy than the perpetuity of life in a body subject to gradual decay, and might therefore be hoped without greater extravagance of folly; but the sentiment here expressed is that of a being to whom immortality, though not perpetual youth, was familiar, and in whom the wish of a perpetual youth only wou'd have been extravagant, because that only appeared from the facts to be impossible."-Hawkesworth.

"If it be said, that although the folly of desiring life to be prolonged under the disadvantages of old age is here finely exposed, yet the desire of terrestrial immortality, upon terms on which alone in the nature of things it is possible-an exemption from disease, accident, and decay-is tacitly allowed; it may be answered, that as we grow old by imperceptible degrees, so for the most part we grow old without repining; and every man is ready to profess himself willing to die, when he shall be overtaken by the decrepitude of age in some future period: yet when every other eye sees that this period is arrived, he is still tenacious of life, and

After this preface, he gave me a particular account of the struldbrugs among them. He said they commonly acted like mortals till about thirty years old; after which, by degrees, they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both till they came to fourscore. This he learned from their own confession; for otherwise, there not being above two or three of that species born in an age, they were too few to form a general observation by. When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionated, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative ; but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren. "Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions. But those objects against which their envy seems principally directed are the vices of the younger sort, and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine that others are gone to a harbour of rest, to which they themselves never can hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle-age, and even that is very imperfect; and for the truth or particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition than upon their best recollections. The least miserable.

among them appear to be those who turn to dotage, and entirely lose their memories; these meet with more pity and assistance, because they want many bad qualities which abound in others.

"If a struldbrug happen to marry one of his own kind, the marriage is dissolved, of course, by the courtesy of the kingdom, as soon as the younger of the two comes to the fourscore; for the law thinks it a reasonable indulgence, that those who are condemned, without any fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have their miseries doubled by the load of a wife.

"As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years, they are looked on as dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates; only a small pittance is reserved for their support; and the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period, they

To reconcile old age,

murmurs at the condition upon which he received his existence. therefore, to the thoughts of a dissolution, appears to be all that was necessary in a moral writer for practical purposes."-Hawkesworth.

are held incapable of any employment of trust or profit; they cannot purchase lands, or take leases; neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause, either civil or criminal, not even for the decision of meers and bounds.

"At ninety, they lose their teeth and hair; they have at that age no distinction of taste, but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to still continue, without increasing or diminishing. In talking, they forget the common appellation of things, and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relations. For the same reason, they never can amuse themselves with reading, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and by this defect they are deprived of the only entertainment whereof they might otherwise be capable.

"The language of this country being always upon the flux, the struldbrugs of one age do not understand those of another; neither are they able after two hundred years to hold any conversation (further than by a few general words) with their neighbours, the mortals; and thus they lie under the disadvantage of living like foreigners in their own country."

This was the account given me of the struldbrugs, as near as I can remember. I afterwards saw five or six of different ages, the youngest not above two hundred years old, who were brought to me at several times by some of my friends; but although they were told that I was a great traveller, and had seen all the world, they had not the least curiosity to ask me a question; only desired I would give them slumskudash, or a token of remembrance, which is a modest way of begging, to avoid the law, that strictly forbids it, because they are provided for by the public, although indeed with a very scanty allow

ance.

They are despised and hated by all sorts of people. When one of them is born, it is reckoned ominous, and their birth is recorded very particularly so that you may know their age by consulting the register, which, however, has not been kept above a thousand years past, or at least has been destroyed by time or public disturbances. But the usual way of computing how old they are is by asking them what kings or great persons they can remember, and then consulting history; for infallibly the last prince in their mind did not begin his reign after they were fourscore years old.

They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld; and the women were more horrible than the men. Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness, in proportion to their number of years, which is not to be described; and among half a dozen, I soon distinguished which was the eldest, although there was not above a century or two between them.*

The reader will easily believe, that from what I had heard and seen, my keen appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated. I grew heartily ashamed of the pleasing visions I had formed; and thought no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run with pleasure, from such a life.† The king heard of all that had passed between

• The melancholy and appalling picture here drawn of the struldbrugs, reminds one forcibly of the masterly one which Juvenal has left us of the "labour and sorrow" of extreme old age, when reproving, in his tenth Satire, those who pray earnestly for a life extended through many years :—

"Deformem et tetrum ante omnia vultum,
Dissimilemque sui, deformem pro cute pellem
Pendentesque genas, et tales aspice rugas,
Quales, umbriferos ubi pandit Tabraca saltus,
In velula, scalpit jam mater simia bucca.

Una senum facies, cum voce trementia membra,
Et jam læve caput, madidique infantia nasi.
Frangendus misero gingiva panis inermi.”

And, worse than these physical sufferings, the loss of mind and memory :

"Sed omni

Membrorum damno major dementia, quæ nec
Nomina servorum, nec vultum agnoscit amici
Cum quo præterita cœnavit nocte, nec illos.
Quos genuit, quos eduxit."

Even Christian sages have looked on extreme old age as little to be desired. Quum si homines optant senectutem," says St. Augustine; "quod aliud optant nisi longam infirmitatem." And Petrarch, in his eighty-third Dialogue, "De Senectute," observes, that "the traveller should indeed be senseless, who, when exhausted with the labour of life's journey, could desire to commence it again: to the weary man nothing is more grateful than the rest in his inn."

† It is a pleasurable relief to turn from Swift's gloomy picture of old age to the philosophic reflections of a distinguished man of his own times, even while contemplating Gulliver's "immortals." Horace Walpole, writing to the Countess of Ossory, from his retreat in Strawberry Hill (June 7th, 1785), alluding to himself as a struldbrug who has outlived all his passions and pursuits, and detailing his physical sufferings, says: "But I beg your pardon, madam, though I cannot but smile with thinking how you will be disappointed on receiving, instead of a letter, the reflections of a struldbrug on his own inanity. When Swift drew the character, he did not know it. Poor man! the turbulence of his own temper, and the apprehensions of his own decay, made him conceive it a miserable condition: on the contrary, it is almost a gay one, when one can be sensible of it and of all its enjoyments." Let us dismiss this subject with the noble and touching reflections of Dr. Johnson :-"It cannot surely be supposed that old age, worn with labours, harassed with anxieties, and tortured with diseases, should have any gladness of its own, or feel any satisfaction from the contemplation of the present. All the comfort that can now be expected must be recalled from the past, or borrowed from the future: the past is very soon exhausted, all the events or actions of which