A LETTER FROM CAPTAIN GULLIVER TO HIS COUSIN SYMPSON.
extinguished; judges learned and upright; pleaders honest and
modest, with some tincture of common sense, and Smithfield blazing
with pyramids of law books; the young nobility's education entirely
changed; the physicians banished; the female Yahoos abounding in
virtue, honour, truth, and good sense; courts and levees of great
ministers thoroughly weeded and swept; wit, merit, and learning
rewarded; all disgracers of the press in prose and verse condemned
to eat nothing but their own cotton, and quench their thirst with
their own ink. These, and a thousand other reformations, I firmly
counted upon by your encouragement; as indeed they were plainly
deducible from the precepts delivered in my book. And it must be
owned, that seven months were a sufficient time to correct every
vice and folly to which Yahoos are subject, if their natures had
been capable of the least disposition to virtue or wisdom. Yet, so
far have you been from answering my expectation in any of your
letters; that on the contrary you are loading our carrier every
week with libels, and keys, and reflections, and memoirs, and
second parts; wherein I see myself accused of reflecting upon great
state folk; of degrading human nature (for so they have still the
confidence to style it), and of abusing the female sex. I find
likewise that the writers of those bundles are not agreed among
themselves; for some of them will not allow me to be the author of
my own travels; and others make me author of books to which I am
wholly a stranger.
I find likewise that your printer has been so careless as to
confound the times, and mistake the dates, of my several voyages
and returns; neither assigning the true year, nor the true month,
nor day of the month: and I hear the original manuscript is all
destroyed since the publication of my book; neither have I any copy
left: however, I have sent you some corrections, which you may
insert, if ever there should be a second edition: and yet I cannot
stand to them; but shall leave that matter to my judicious and
candid readers to adjust it as they please.
I hear some of our sea Yahoos find fault with my sea-language, as
not proper in many parts, nor now in use. I cannot help it. In my
first voyages, while I was young, I was instructed by the oldest
mariners, and learned to speak as they did. But I have since found
that the sea Yahoos are apt, like the land ones, to become new-
fangled in their words, which the latter change every year;
insomuch, as I remember upon each return to my own country their
old dialect was so altered, that I could hardly understand the new.
And I observe, when any Yahoo comes from London out of curiosity to
visit me at my house, we neither of us are able to deliver our
conceptions in a manner intelligible to the other.
If the censure of the Yahoos could any way affect me, I should have
great reason to complain, that some of them are so bold as to think
my book of travels a mere fiction out of mine own brain, and have
gone so far as to drop hints, that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have
no more existence than the inhabitants of Utopia.
Indeed I must confess, that as to the people of Lilliput,
Brobdingrag (for so the word should have been spelt, and not
erroneously Brobdingnag), and Laputa, I have never yet heard of any
Yahoo so presumptuous as to dispute their being, or the facts I