A Project for the Universal Benefit of Mankind
The author, having laboured so long and done so much to serve and instruct the public, without any advantage to himself, has at last thought of a project which will tend to the great benefit of all mankind, and produce a handsome revenue to the author. He intends to print by subscription, in ninety-six large volumes in folio, an exact description of Terra Australis incognita, collected with great care, and prints from 999 learned and pious authors of undoubted veracity. The whole work, illustrated with maps and cuts agreeable to the subject, and done by the best masters, will cost but one guinea each volume to subscribers, one guinea to be paid in advance, and afterwards a guinea on receiving each volume, except the last. This work will be of great use for all men, and necessary for all families, because it contains exact accounts of all the provinces, colonies, and mansions of that spacious country, where, by a general doom, all transgressors of the law are to be transported; and every one having this work may choose out the fittest and best place for himself, there being enough for all, so as every one shall be fully satisfied.
The author supposes that one copy of this work will be bought at the public charge, or out of the parish rates, for every parish church in the three kingdoms, and in all the dominions thereunto belonging. And that every family that can command £10 per annum, even though retrenched from less necessary expenses, will subscribe for one. He does not think of giving out above nine volumes nearly; and considering the number requisite, he intends to print at least 100,000 for the first edition. He is to print proposals against next term, with a specimen, and a curious map of the capital city with its twelve gates, from a known author, who took an exact survey of it in a dream. Considering the great care and pains of the author, and the usefulness of the work, he hopes every one will be ready, for their own good as well as his, to contribute cheerfully to it, and not grudge him the profit he may have by it, especially if he comes to a third or fourth edition, as he expects it will very soon.
He doubts not but it will be translated into foreign languages by most nations of Europe, as well as Asia and Africa, being of as great use to all those nations as to his own; for this reason he designs to procure patents and privileges for securing the whole benefit to himself from all those different princes and states, and hopes to see many millions of this great work printed in those different countries and languages before his death.
After this business is pretty well established, he has promised to put a friend on another project almost as good as this, by establishing insurance offices everywhere for securing people from shipwreck and several other accidents in their voyage to this country; and these officers shall furnish, at a certain rate, pilots well versed in the route, and that know all the rocks, shelves, quicksands, &c., that such pilgrims and travellers may be exposed to. Of these he knows a great number ready instructed in most countries; but the whole scheme of this matter he is to draw up at large and communicate to his friend.
Footnotes50
The number of livings in England.—Pate.
51a “Distinguished, new, told by no other tongue.”—Horace.
51b “Reading prefaces, &c.”—Swift’s note in the margin.
56a Plutarch.—Swift’s note in the margin.
56b Xenophon.—Swift’s note in the margin, marked, in future, S.
56c Spleen.—Horace.
59 “But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labour lies.”
—Dryden’s “Virgil”
60 “That the old may withdraw into safe ease.”
61 In his subsequent apology for “The Tale of a Tub,” Swift wrote of these machines that, “In the original manuscript there was a description of a fourth, which those who had the papers in their power blotted out, as having something in it of satire that I suppose they thought was too particular; and therefore they were forced to change it to the number three, whence some have endeavoured to squeeze out a dangerous meaning that was never thought on. And indeed the conceit was half spoiled by changing the numbers; that of four being much more cabalistic, and therefore better exposing the pretended virtue of numbers, a superstition then intended to be ridiculed.”
62a “Under the rainy sky, in the meetings of three and of four ways.”
62b Lucretius, lib. 2.—S.
62c “’Tis certain, then, the voice that thus can wound;
Is all material body, every sound.”
63 To be burnt or worm-eaten.
64 The Royal Society first met at Gresham College, the resort of men of science. Will’s Coffee-House was the resort of wits and men of letters.
65a Viz., about moving the earth.—S.
65b “Virtuoso experiments and modern comedies.”—S.
67a He lived a thousand.—S.
67b Viz., in the year 1697.—S. Dryden died in 1700, and the publication of the “Tale of a Tub,” written in 1697, was not until 1704.
69a The title-page in the original was so torn that it was not possible to recover several titles which the author here speaks of.—S.
69b See Virgil translated, &c.—S.
70 Peter, the Church of Rome; Martin, the Reformed Church as established by authority in England; Jack, the dissenters from the English Church Establishment. Martin, named probably from Martin Luther; Jack, from John Calvin. The coats are the coats of righteousness, in which all servants of God should be clothed; alike in love and duty, however they may differ in opinion.
71 Covetousness, ambition, and pride, which were the three great vices that the ancient fathers inveighed against as the first corruptions of Christianity.—W. Wotton.
72a The tailor.
72b A sacred monkey.
75 The Roman Catholics were considered by the Reformers to have added to the simple doctrines of Christianity inventions of their own, and to have laid especial stress on the adoption of them. Upon Swift’s saying of the three brothers, “Now the coats their father had left them were, it is true, of very good cloth, and besides so neatly sewn that you would swear they were all of a piece, but, at the same time, very plain, with little or no ornament,” W. Wotton observes: “This is the distinguishing character of the Christian religion. Christiana religio absoluta et simplex, was Ammianus Marcellinus’s description of it, who was himself a heathen.” But the learned Peter argues that if a doctrine cannot be found, totidem verbis, in so many words, it may be found in so many syllables, or, if that way fail, we shall make them out in a third way, of so many letters.
76 Quibusdam veteribus codicibus [some ancient MSS.].—S.
77a There are two kinds—oral tradition and the written record,—reference to the value attached to tradition in the Roman Church.
77b The flame-coloured lining figures the doctrine of Purgatory; and the codicil annexed, the Apocryphal books annexed to the Bible. The dog-keeper is said to be an allusion to the Apocryphal book of Tobit.
78a Dread hell and subdue their lusts.
78b Strained glosses and interpretations of the simple text.
79a Images in churches.
79b The locking up of the Gospel in the original Greek or in the Latin of the Vulgate, and forbidding its diffusion in the language of the people.
80a The Pope’s bulls and decretals, issued by his paternal authority, that must determine questions of interpretation and tradition, or else many absurd things would follow.
80b Constantine the Great, from whom the Church of Rome was said to have received the donation of St. Peter’s patrimony, and first derived the wealth described by our old Reformers as “the fatal gift of Constantine.”
84a See Wotton “Of Ancient and Modern Learning.”—S.
84b Satire and panegyric upon critics.—S.
85 Vide excerpta ex eo apud Photium—S.
86 “Near Helicon and round the learned hill
Grow trees whose blossoms with their odour kill.”—Hawkesworth.
88 A quotation after the manner of a great author. Vide Bentley’s “Dissertation,” &c.—S.
89 “And how they’re disappointed when they’re pleased.”—Congreve, quoted by Pate.
95 Refusing the cup of sacrament to the laity. Thomas Warton observes on the following passage its close resemblance to the speech of Panurge in Rabelais, and says that Swift formed himself upon Rabelais.
96 Transubstantiation.
98a The Reformation.
98b The cross (in hoc signo vinces). Pieces of the wood said to be part of it were many in the churches.
98c One miracle to be believed was that the Chapel of Loretto travelled from the Holy Land to Italy.
99a Made a true copy of the Bible in the language of the people.
99b Gave the cup to the laity.
99c Allowed marriages of priests.
102a Homerus omnes res humanas poematis complexus est.—Xenophon in Conviv.—S.
102b A treatise written about fifty years ago by a Welsh gentleman of Cambridge. His name, as I remember, Vaughan, as appears by the answer to it by the learned Dr. Henry More. It is a piece of the most unintelligible fustian that perhaps was ever published in any language.—S. This piece was by the brother of Henry Vaughan, the poet.
110 After the changes made by Martin that transformed the Church of Rome into the Church of England, Jack’s proceedings made a rent from top to bottom by the separation of the Presbyterians from the Church Establishment.
111a The galleries over the piazzas in the old Royal Exchange were formerly filled with shops, kept chiefly by women. Illustrations of this feature in London life are to be found in Dekker’s “Shoemaker’s Holiday,” and other plays.
111b The contraction of the word mobile to mob first appeared in the time of Charles the Second.
112 Jack the Bald, Calvin, from calvus, bald; Jack with a Lanthorn, professing inward lights, Quakers; Dutch Jack, Jack of Leyden, Anabaptists; French Hugh, the Huguenots; Tom the Beggar, the Gueuses of Flanders; Knocking Jack of the North, John Knox of Scotland. Æolists pretenders to inspiration.
116 Herodotus, l. 4.—S.
119a Bombast von Hohenheim—Paracelsus.
119b Fanatical preachers of rebellion.
120 Pausanias, l. 8.—S.
122 The Quakers allowed women to preach.
123 The worshippers of wind or air found their evil spirits in the chameleon, by which it was eaten, and the windmill, Moulin-à-vent, by whose four hands it was beaten.
126a Henry IV. of France.
126b Ravaillac, who stabbed Henry IV.
127a Swift’s contemporary, Louis XIV. of France.
127b Western civet. Paracelsus was said to have endeavoured to extract a perfume from human excrement that might become as fashionable as civet from the cat. It was called zibeta occidentalis, the back being, according to Paracelsus, the western part of the body.
129 Ep. Fam. vii. 10, to Trebatius, who, as the next sentence in the letter shows, had not gone into England.
135 A lawyer’s coach-hire.—S.
136 The College of Physicians.
140 The bad critics.
142 A name under which Thomas Vaughan wrote.
145a Revelations xxii. 11: “He which is filthy, let him be filthy still;” “phrase of the will,” being Scripture phrase, of either Testament, applied to every occasion, and often in the most unbecoming manner.
145b He did not kneel when he received the Sacrament.
146a His inward lights.
146b Predestination.
147a Vide Don Quixote.—S.
147b Swift borrowed this from the customs of Moronia—Fool’s Land—in Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem.
148a The Presbyterians objected to church-music, and had no organs in their meeting-houses.
148b Opposed to the decoration of church walls.
148c Baptism by immersion.
148d Preaching.
151a “This wicked Proteus shall escape the chain.”—Francis’s Horace.
151b Lib. de Aëre, Locis, et Aquis.—S.
152a Charles II., by the Act of Uniformity, which drove two thousand ministers of religion, including some of the most devout, in one day out of the Church of England.
152b “Including Scaliger’s,” is Swift’s note in the margin. The sixth sense was the “common sense” which united and conveyed to the mind as one whole the information brought in by the other five. Common sense did not originally mean the kind of sense common among the people generally. A person wanting in common sense was one whose brain did not properly combine impressions brought into it by the eye, the ear, &c.
153 Reference here is to the exercise by James II. of a dispensing power which illegally protected Roman Catholics, and incidentally Dissenters also; to the consequent growth of feeling against the Roman Catholics. “Jack on a great horse and eating custard” represents what was termed the occasional conformity of men who “blasphemed custard through the nose,” but complied with the law that required them to take Sacrament in the Church of England as qualification for becoming a Lord Mayor or holding any office of public authority.
155 Père d’Orleans.—S.
157 Trazenii, Pausan. L. 2.—S.
160a Henry VIII.
160b “Fidei Defensor.”
161a Edward VI.
161b Queen Mary.
161c Queen Elizabeth.
162a James I.
162b Episcopacy.
162c Charles I.
164a Cromwell.
164b Charles II.
164c James II.
164d William III.
165a High Church against Dissent.