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ing boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn the engine was so contrived that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labour; and the professor showed me several volumes in large folio, already collected, of broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences; which, however, might be still improved and much expedited if the public would raise a fund for making and employing five hundred such frames in Lagado.

He assured me "that this invention had employed all his thoughts from his youth; that he had entered the whole vocabulary into his frame, and made the strictest computation of the general proportion there is in books between the number of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of speech."

I made my humblest acknowledgment to this illustrious person for his explanations, and promised, "if ever I had the good fortune to return to my native country, that I would do him justice as the sole inventor of this wonderful machine," the form and contrivance of which I desired leave to draw on paper. I told him, "although it were the custom of our learned in Europe to steal inventions from each other, with the advantage that it became a controversy which was the right owner, yet I would take such caution that he should have the honour entire, without a rival."

In the school of political projectors I was but ill entertained—the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses, which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favourites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, and eminent services; of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employments persons qualified to exercise them, with many other wild, impossible chimeras that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive.

I heard a very warm debate between two professors about the most commodious and effectual ways and means of raising money without grieving the subject. The first affirmed: "The justest method would be to lay a certain tax upon vices and folly; and the sum fixed upon every man to be rated, after the fairest manner, by a jury of his neighbours." The second was of an opinion directly contrary: "To tax those qualities of body and mind for which men chiefly value themselves-the rate to be more or less according to the degrees of excellence, the decision whereof should be left entirely to their own breast.”

The highest tax was upon men who are the greatest favourites of the other sex. Wit, valour, and politeness were likewise proposed to be largely taxed, and collected in the same manner, by every person's

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giving his own word for the quantum of what he possessed. But as to honour, justice, wisdom, and learning, they should not be taxed at all, because they are qualifications of so singular a kind that no man will either allow them in his neighbour or value them in himself.

The women were proposed to be taxed according to their beauty and skill in dressing, wherein they had the same privilege with the men, to be determined by their own judgment. But constancy, good sense, and good nature were not rated, because they would not bear the charge of collecting.

I observed here and there many in the habit of servants, with a blown bladder fastened like a flail to the end of a short stick, which they carried in their hands. In each bladder was a small quantity of dried peas or little pebbles, as I was afterwards informed. With these bladders they now and then flapped the mouths and ears of those who stood near them-of which practice I could not then conceive the meaning. It seems the minds of these people are so taken up with intense speculations that they neither can speak nor attend to the discourses of others without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing; for which reason those persons who are able to afford it always keep a Flapper in their family as one of their domestics, nor ever walk abroad or make visits without him. And the business of this officer is, when two, three, or more persons are in company, gently to strike with his bladder

the mouth of him who is to speak, and the right ear of him or them to whom the speaker addresses himself. This flapper is likewise employed diligently to attend his master in his walks, and upon occasion to give him a soft flap on his eyes, because he is always so wrapt up in cogitation that he is in manifest danger of falling down every precipice and bouncing his head against every post.

The knowledge I had in mathematics gave me great assistance in acquiring their phraseology, which depended much on that science and music; and in the latter I was not unskilful. Their ideas are perpetually conversant in lines and figures. If they would, for example, praise the beauty of a woman or any other animal, they describe it by rhombs, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and other geometrical terms, or by words of art drawn from music, needless here to repeat. I observed that their houses are very ill built, without one right angle in any apartment; and this defect ariseth from the contempt they bear to practical geometry, which they despise as vulgar and mechanic, those instructions they give being too refined for the intellectuals of their workmen, which occasions perpetual mistakes. And although they are dexterous enough upon a piece of paper in the management of the ruler, the pencil, and the divider, yet in the common acts and behaviour of life I have not seen a more clumsy, awkward, and unhandy people, nor so slow and perplexed in their conceptions upon all other subjects except those of mathematics and music.

DEAN SWIFT.

21. MUSIC.

A SONG FOR ST. CECILIA'S DAY, 1687.

From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:

When Nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,

And could not heave her head,

The tuneful voice was heard on high,

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Then hot, and cold, and moist, and dry
In order to their stations leap,
And music's power obey.

From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began;

Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man.

What passion cannot music raise and quell?
When Jubal struck the chorded shell,
His listening brethren stood around,
And, wondering, on their faces fell
To worship that celestial sound;

Less than a god they thought there could not dwell
Within the hollow of that shell

That spoke so sweetly and so well. What passion cannot Music raise and quell?

The trumpet's loud clangour

Excites us to arms,
With shrill notes of anger,

And mortal alarms.

The double, double, double beat
Of the thundering drum

Cries Hark! the foes come ;

Charge, charge, 'tis too late to retreat!

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