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Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World
Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World Author:Jonathan Swift Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: tween both realms, from the continual reception of exiles, which is mutual among them, and from the customi in each empire to send their young nobility and riche... more »r gentry to the other, in order to polish themselves by seeing the world, and understanding men and manners, there are few persons of distinction, or merchants, or seamen, who dwell in the maritime parts, but what can hold conversation in both tongues; as I found some weeks after, when I went to pay my respects to the Emperor of Blefuscu, which, in the midst of great misfortunes through the malice of my enemies, proved a very happy adventure to me, as I shall relate in its proper place. The reader may remember, that, when I signed those articles upon which I recovered my liberty, there were some which I disliked upon account of their being too servile, neither could anything but an extreme necessity have forced me to submit. But, being now a nardac of the highest rank in that Empire, such offices were looked upon as below my dignity, and the Emperor (to do him justice) never once mentioned them to me. ! CHAPTER VI. Although I intend to leave the description of this empire to a particular treatise, yet, in the meantime, I am content to gratify the curiousreader with some general ideas. As the common size of the natives is somewhat under six inches high, so there is an exact proportion in all other animals, as well as plants and trees: for instance, the tallest horses and oxen are between four and five inches in height, the sheep an inch and half more or less; their geese about the bigness of a sparrow, and so the several gradations downwards, till you come to the smallest, which, to my sight, were almost invisible; but nature hath adapted the eyes of the Lilliputians to all objects proper for their view: they see w...« less