It would be tedious to trouble the reader with relating
what vast numbers of illustrious persons were called
up to gratify that insatiable desire I had to see
the world in every period of antiquity placed before
me. I chiefly fed mine eyes with beholding the
destroyers of tyrants and usurpers, and the restorers
of liberty to oppressed and injured nations.
But it is impossible to express the satisfaction
I received in my own mind, after such a manner as
to make it a suitable entertainment to the reader.
[A further account of Glubbdubdrib. Ancient
and modern history corrected.]
Having a desire to see those ancients who were most
renowned for wit and learning, I set apart one day
on purpose. I proposed that Homer and Aristotle
might appear at the head of all their commentators;
but these were so numerous, that some hundreds were
forced to attend in the court, and outward rooms of
the palace. I knew, and could distinguish those
two heroes, at first sight, not only from the crowd,
but from each other. Homer was the taller and
comelier person of the two, walked very erect for one
of his age, and his eyes were the most quick and piercing
I ever beheld. Aristotle stooped much, and made
use of a staff. His visage was meagre, his hair
lank and thin, and his voice hollow. I soon
discovered that both of them were perfect strangers
to the rest of the company, and had never seen or
heard of them before; and I had a whisper from a ghost
who shall be nameless, “that these commentators
always kept in the most distant quarters from their
principals, in the lower world, through a consciousness
of shame and guilt, because they had so horribly misrepresented
the meaning of those authors to posterity.”
I introduced Didymus and Eustathius to Homer, and
prevailed on him to treat them better than perhaps
they deserved, for he soon found they wanted a genius
to enter into the spirit of a poet. But Aristotle
was out of all patience with the account I gave him
of Scotus and Ramus, as I presented them to him; and
he asked them, “whether the rest of the tribe
were as great dunces as themselves?”
I then desired the governor to call up Descartes and
Gassendi, with whom I prevailed to explain their systems
to Aristotle. This great philosopher freely
acknowledged his own mistakes in natural philosophy,
because he proceeded in many things upon conjecture,
as all men must do; and he found that Gassendi, who
had made the doctrine of Epicurus as palatable as
he could, and the vortices of Descartes, were equally
to be exploded. He predicted the same fate to
attraction, whereof the present learned are such
zealous asserters. He said, “that new
systems of nature were but new fashions, which would
vary in every age; and even those, who pretend to
demonstrate them from mathematical principles, would
flourish but a short period of time, and be out of
vogue when that was determined.”
