[64]: Petit livre à l'usage des enfants, ainsi que Whittington et son chat, nommé plus loin.
[65]: The types are so apposite and the applications so necessary and natural, that it is not easy to conceive how any reader of a modern age or taste, could overlook them.... For first: Pausanias is of an opinion that the perfection of writing correct was entirely owing to the institution of criticks; and that he can possibly mean no other than the true critick is, I think, manifest from the following description. He says they were a race of men, who delighted to nibble at the superfluities and excrescencies of books, which the learned at length observing took warning, of their own accord, to lop the luxuriant, the rotten, the dead, the sapless, and the overgrown branches from their works. But now all this he cunningly shades under the following allegory: that the Nauplians in Argos learned the art of pruning their vines, by observing that when an ass had browsed upon one of them, it thrived the better and bore fairer fruits.
[66]: Herodotus holding the same hieroglyph speaks much plainer and almost in terminis; he has been so bold as to tax the true criticks of ignorance and malice, telling us openly (for I think nothing can be plainer), that in the western part of Libya there were asses with horns.
[67]: Les descriptions qui suivent sont telles que je n'ose les traduire.
[68]: Is any student tearing his straw in piece-meal, swearing and blaspheming, biting his grate, foaming at the mouth, and emptying his piss-pot in the spectator's faces? Let the right worshipfull commissioners of inspection give him a regiment of dragoons, and send him into Flanders among the rest.... You will find a third taking gravely the dimensions of his kennel; a person of foresight and insight, though kept quite in the dark.... He walks duly in one pace.... talks much of hard times and taxes and the whore of Babylon, bars up the wooden window of his cell constantly at eight o'clock, dreams of fire.... Now what a figure would all those acquirements make if the owner were sent into the city among his brethren!... Accost the hole of another kennel (first stopping your nose), you will behold a surly, gloomy, nasty, slovenly mortal, raking in his own dung, and dabbling in his urine; the best parts of his diet is the reversion of his own ordure, which, expiring into steams, whirls perpetually about, and at last reinfunds. His complexion is of a dirty yellow, with a thin scattered beard, exactly agreeable to that of his diet upon its first declination; like other insects who having their birth and education in a excrement, from thence borrow their colour and their smell.... Now is it not amazing the society of Warwick-lane should have no more concern for the recovery of so useful a member?... I shall not descend so minutely, as to insist upon the vast number of beaux, fiddlers, poets, and politicians, that the world might recover by such a reformation.... Even I myself, the author of these momentous truths, am a person whose imaginations are hard-mouthed, and exceedingly disposed to run away with his reason, which I have observed from long experience to be a very light rider, and easily shaken off; upon which account my friends will never trust me alone, without a solemn promise to vent my speculations in this or the like manner, for the universal benefit of mankind.
[69]: When the king has a mind to put any of his nobles to death in a gentle, indulgent manner, he commands the floor to be strewed with a certain brown powder of a deadly composition, which being licked up, infallibly kills him in twenty-four hours. But in justice to this prince's great clemency and the care he has of his subjects' lives (wherein it were much to be wished that the monarchs of Europe would imitate him) it must be mentioned for his honour that strict orders are given to have the infected parts of the floor well washed after every such execution.... I myself heard him give directions that one of his pages should be whipped, whose turn it was to give notice about washing the floor after an execution, but who maliciously had omitted it; by which neglect, a young lord of great hopes coming to an audience, was unfortunately poisoned, although the prince at that time had no design against his life. But this good prince was so gracious as to forgive the poor page his whipping, upon promise that he would do so no more, without special orders.
[70]: Je suis forcé de supprimer plusieurs traits.
[71]: At last I beheld several animals in a field, and one or two of the same kind sitting in trees. Their shape was very singular and deformed.... Their heads and breasts were covered with a thick hair, some frizzled, and others lank. They had beards like goats, and a long ridge of hair behind their back, and the forepart of their legs and feet. But the rest of the body was bare so that I might see their skins, which were of a brown buff colour. They had no tails, nor any hair at all on their buttocks, except about the anus.... They climbed high trees as nimbly as a squirrel, for they had strong extended claws before and behind, terminated in sharp points and hooked.... The females had long lank hair on their head but none on their faces, nor any thing more than a sort of down on the rest of their bodies, except about the anus and pudenda. The dugs hung between their forefeet, and often reached almost to the ground as they walked.... Upon the whole I never beheld in all my travels so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so great an antipathy.
[72]: In most herds there was a sort of ruling yahoo, who was always more deformed in body and mischievous in disposition than any of the rest; this leader had usually a favourite as like himself as he could get, whose employment was to lick his master's feet and posteriors, and drive the female yahoos to his kennel; for which he was now and then rewarded with a piece of ass flesh.... He usually continues in office till a worse can be found; but the very moment he is discarded, his successor, at the head of all the yahoos in that district, male and female, come in a body and discharge their excrements upon him from head to foot.
[73]: I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin, that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.