"Gulliver" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Nares has filled us with astonishment similar to that which Captain Lemuel Gulliver felt when first he landed in Brobdingnag, and saw corn as high as the oaks in the New Forest, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens of the bulk of turkeys. The whole book, and every component part of it, is on a gigantic scale. The title is ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be an amusement; but they may be provoked to revenge the pain which is inflicted upon them; and therefore we should take care not to put children in situations where they are liable to be hurt or terrified by animals. Could we possibly expect, that Gulliver should love the Brobdignagian wasp that buzzed round his cake, and prevented him from eating his breakfast? Could we expect that Gulliver should be ever reconciled to the rat against whom he was obliged to draw his sword? Many animals are, to children, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... "Shakespeare," he said, "never wrote six consecutive good lines." He would only admit two good verses in Gray's exquisite "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," where it would take a very acid critic to find two bad ones. "Tristram Shandy" would not live. "Hamlet" was gabble. Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" was poor stuff, and he never wrote anything good except "A Tale of a Tub." Voltaire was illiterate. Rousseau was a scoundrel. Deists, like Hume, Priestley, or Gibbon, could not ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Rabelais is undoubtedly Dean Swift. We probably never should have had "Gulliver's Travels" from Swift, if we had not first had Gargantua and Pantagruel from Rabelais. Swift, however, differs from Rabelais as well as resembles him. Whereas Rabelais is simply monstrous in invention, Swift ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... the finger that was still thrust between the pages of Gulliver, opened the book, and ran his eye down the list of chapters, as though he were about to select the one most suitable for reading aloud. As Katharine watched him, she was seized with preliminary symptoms of his own panic. At the same time she was convinced that, should ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... GULLIVER'S TRAVELS Into several remote regions of the world. Retold in words of one syllable for young people. ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Travels • Howard R. Garis
... OF MARS.—A correspondent writes that in Gulliver's "Voyage to Laputa," an imaginary flying island, Dean Swift, the author, describes some over-wise philosophers, and, among other ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... upon its head a rock crystal box with a lid. About the feet of this figure are several tiny animals and human beings, so that it looks as if the intent had been to picture some gigantic legendary hunter—a sort of Gulliver of ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... Jest, Beyond Life, and Figures of Earth before him, it is not easy for the perceptive critic to doubt this permanence. One might as sensibly deny a future to Ecclesiastes, The Golden Ass, Gulliver's Travels, and the works of Rabelais as to predict oblivion for such a thesaurus of ironic wit and fine fantasy, mellow wisdom and strange beauty as Jurgen. But to appreciate the tales of Chivalry is, it seems, a gift more frequently reserved for the ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... I like and admire W * *n, and he should not have indulged himself in such outrageous licence.[65] It is overdone and defeats itself. What would he say to the grossness without passion and the misanthropy without feeling of Gulliver's Travels?—When he talks of Lady's Byron's business, he talks of what he knows nothing about; and you may tell him that no one can more desire a public investigation of that affair than ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... were acting a farce, with the Pyramids for the scene. There they rose up enormous under our eyes, and the most absurd trivial things were going on under their shadow. The sublime had disappeared, vast as they were. Do you remember how Gulliver lost his awe of the tremendous Brobdingnag ladies? Every traveller must go through all sorts of chaffering, and bargaining, and paltry experiences, at this spot. You look up the tremendous steps, with ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that "he has more wit than we all have, and his humanity is equal to his wit." "If there were a dozen Arbuthnots in the world," said Swift, "I would burn 'Gulliver's Travels.'" ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... me and Pete!" said Billy Fairfax; "didn't we think, way back there that first day, that our lamps were on the blink because we saw black spots? Great Scott, what dreams I've had," he went on, "a mixture of 'Arabian Nights,' 'Gulliver's Travels,' 'Peter Wilkins,' 'Peter Pan,' 'Goosie,' Jules, Verne, H. G. Wells, and every dime novel I've ever read. Do you suppose ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... descended upon his magnificent intellect, and he died October 19, 1745. "To think of his ruin," said Thackeray, "is like thinking of the ruin of an empire." No more original work of genius than Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" exists in the English language. For sheer intellectual power it may not be equal to the "Tale of a Tub," but as it has more variety, so it has more art. "Gulliver" was published in 1726, at a period when ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... mean by all this is, to let thee see what a stupid figure I shall make to all my own family, if my Clarissa has been capable, as Gulliver in his abominable Yahoo story phrases it, if it were only that I should be outwitted by such a novice at plotting, and that it would make me look silly to my kinswomen here, who know I value myself upon my contrivances, it would vex me to the heart; and I would instantly clap a featherbed ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... within, as the first traceable beginning of our love. Something of that sort happened to Lydgate. He was a quick fellow, and when hot from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it. Something he must read, when he was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the talk of men. All this was true of him at ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Frenchman and the Irishman understand the rapier of biting satire as does not the Englishman: for direct abuse of anyone, no matter how richly merited, nearly always puts the Englishman on the side of the man who is being abused. What happened to Swift's Gulliver—that most fierce attack upon the human race? The English people drew its sting and turned it into a nursery book that has delighted their children ever since. There are more ways than one of winning a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... account of his not being elevated to the Episcopal Bench, when he was promised a vacancy, which was reserved for him; but Queen Anne absolutely refused to confer such a dignity upon the author of "Gulliver's Travels"—that profound satire upon society and religion; and this occurring at a time when his energetic services were so much needed in defence of the government he so assisted by pamphleteering, ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... statements everywhere put in circulation; and when the Longbows of the place got full hold of it, Gulliver, Peter Wilkins, and Sinbad the Sailor were completely eclipsed. Diamonds as big as hen's eggs, and pearls the size of hazelnuts, were said to be the commonest buttons and ornaments the Princess wore, and her silks and shawls were set beyond ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... suffered frightfully from the consciousness of his own scepticism, and that he had bent his pride so far down as to put his apostasy out to hire." I doubt whether any of Swift's works are very much read now, but perhaps Gulliver's travels are oftener in the hands of modern readers than any other. Of all the satires in our language it is probably the most cynical, the most absolutely illnatured, and therefore the falsest. Let those who care to form an opinion of Swift's mind ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... period—of Nash, Dekker, Greene, Gabriel Harvey. There are also a long series of the first editions of Dryden; the earliest issues of the first complete edition of 'Pilgrim's Progress'; of 'Robinson Crusoe' (the three parts); of 'Gulliver's Travels,' besides about a score of other editiones principes of Swift, Pope, Goldsmith, Fielding, Richardson, Johnson, Gay, Gray, Lamb, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Thackeray, Dickens and many others. The two early printed books of especial ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... Every man, like Gulliver in Lilliput, is fastened to some spot of earth, by the thousand small threads which habit and association are continually stealing over him. Of these, perhaps, one of the strongest is ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... boat, but it was soon out of their reach. Thus a great naval victory had been gained, and the whole of the enemy's fleet captured without the loss of a man. Nothing like it had been achieved since the days of the great Gulliver. ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... possible. The boats, which were new when they entered the surf, came out much the worse for wear, and the boat in which Dr. Hastings landed was stove in. Once on shore, life became a succession of wonders, rivaling the tales of Gulliver, and needing the conscientious descriptions of exact scientists ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... experience, that I grudge no expense in your education, but I will positively not keep you a flapper. You may read, in Dr. Swift, the description of these flappers, and the use they were of to your friends the Laputans; whose minds (Gulliver says) 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 people who are able to afford it, always ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... "Then I am going to play the role of Gulliver! We shall realise the fable of the giants! That is the advantage of leaving one's own planet ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... The firm is Gulliver among the Lilliputs; and it must not be forgotten, that while the small, independent traders are fighting for their own hand, and inflamed with the usual jealousy against corporations, the Germans are inspired with a sense of the greatness ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of ballad-singers, was a severe satire upon the Duke of Marlborough, beginning "Our Johnny is come from the wars:" it drew much attention, and excited the strongest resentment against the author in the breast of the Duchess, who remained implacable until the publication of Gulliver, when she offered her friendship to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... time, that the strong poacher could not have lifted a finger against Mr. Gray, though it had been to save himself from being apprehended and taken to the lock-ups the very next hour. He had rather listened to the parson's bold words with an approving smile, much as Mr. Gulliver might have hearkened to a lecture from a Lilliputian. But when brave words passed into kind deeds, Gregson's heart mutely acknowledged its master and keeper. And the beauty of it all was, that Mr. Gray knew nothing of the good work he had done, or recognized ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... most folks in Black Log I am a regular Gulliver," I answered. "My father was a much-travelled man. He was an Englishman and came to the valley by chance and settled here, and to his dying day he was a puzzle to the people. That an Englishman should come to Six Stars was a phenomenon. That Isaac Bolum and Henry ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... to him, laid one thin hand on his knee, looked in his face for a moment, and then, without a word, sat down on the couch close beside him. Before an hour had passed, Harry was laughing heartily at Gulliver's adventures amongst the Lilliputians. Having arrived at this point of success, Hugh ceased reading, and began ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... interpreted by prejudice and passion—if we contend for such truisms as these, shall we not be in danger of occupying some such position as the worthy prelate whose sagacity led him to discover that some facts in Gulliver's Travels had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... number the reports of the debates of the Senate of Lilliput began. To his fertile mind was very likely due this humorous expedient by which the resolution of the House was mocked. That he wrote the introduction in which is narrated the voyage of Captain Gulliver's grandson to Lilliputia can scarcely be doubted. It bears all the marks of his early style. The Lords become Hurgoes, and the Commons Clinabs, Walpole becomes Walelop, Pulteney Pulnub, and Pitt Ptit; otherwise the report is much as it had been. At the end of the volume ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... incident of his life during this summer, which shows how eagerly such a little band of frontiersmen read a book, and how real its characters became to their minds. He was encamped with five other men on Red River, and they had with them for their "amusement the history of Samuel Gulliver's travels, wherein he gave an account of his young master, Glumdelick, careing [sic] him on a market day for a show to a town called Lulbegrud." In the party who, amid such strange surroundings, read and listened to Dean Swift's writings was a young man named Alexander Neely. One night he ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... of News-writers, and Petty-Statesmen, of all sides. It continued until May, 1713. The Consolidator; or, Memoirs of sundry Transactions from the world in the moon. Translated from the Lunar Language, was published in 1765, a political satire, which, it has been thought, gave hints to Swift for Gulliver. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... was the only journal in which the book was noticed, and such criticism as the following can hardly be termed laudatory:—"Here is a very strange performance indeed. It seems to be the illegitimate offspring of no very natural conjunction, like 'Gulliver's Travels' and 'Robinson Crusoe;' but much inferior to the manner of these two performances as to entertainment or utility. It has all that is impossible in the one or impossible in the other, without the wit and spirit of the first, or ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... to Robinson Crusoe and the Arabian Nights, Gulliver's Travels and Don Quixote, both arranged for children, the pretty, stories of Nieritz and others, descriptions of Nature and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... vigorous, the language of the fireside, street, market and farm. It is this style which characterizes the Bible and many of the great English classics such as the "Pilgrim's Progress," "Robinson Crusoe," and "Gulliver's Travels." ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... turned his eyes upon those standing about him, without any appearance of fear, but rather with a look of contempt, like that which Gulliver must have felt for the Lilliputians who had ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... pathetic story, "A Horse's Tale." Also "Eve's Diary," which, under its humor, is filled with tenderness, and he began a wildly fantastic tale entitled "Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes," a satire in which Gulliver is outdone. He never finished it. He never could finish it, for it ran off into amazing by-paths that led nowhere, and the tale was lost. Yet he always meant to get at it again some day and ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... diminutive man or woman: from Gulliver's Travels, written by Dean Swift, where an imaginary kingdom of dwarfs ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... domain were once deserted by the imps, there remains the breadth, which must have the same capacity for holding something better. Unfortunately, a long occupancy by these miserable little offenders means eventually the saddest sort of contraction. What a picture for a new Gulliver!—a human being overwhelmed by the imps of triviality, and bound fast to the ground by manifold windings of ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... not taught there. I'll bring you a book all about it when I come back. Mr. Gulliver went to the horse-country and heard the dear things ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... tonight," she announced, "tells a hitherto unpublished one of Gulliver's Travels, namely, his voyage to ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... the Lilliputians called Gulliver (ch. ii.).—Swift, Gulliver's Travels ("Voyage to ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... here, is at first apt to feel like Gulliver, who has come to Lilliput, and, on the whole, does not get on well among the inhabitants, until he has screwed down his old customary ideas to the simple proportions of their insignificant life; in ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... surgical instruments. There is also an ingenious Japanese model of the Island of Desina, the Dutch factory in Japan. It appears almost as the island itself would if seen through a reversed opera glass and makes one feel like a Gulliver coming unexpectedly upon a Japanese Lilliput. There you see hundreds of people in native costumes, standing, kneeling, stooping, reaching—all at work, or pretending to be—and their dwellings, even their very furniture, spread out before you, ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... to draw on, we were driving beneath the trees of a wild jungle; arriving soon after at a large lake, we left the carriages. The shores were overgrown with reeds—not the reeds that answer our European notions, but rather such as Gulliver was likely to meet with in his travels to Brobdingnag. The place was perfectly deserted, but we saw a boat fastened close to the land. We had still about an hour and a half of daylight before us, and so we quietly sat down on some ruins and ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... of a well-remembered shore in the mind of some wave-tossed traveller. And the occasion which produced that prosaic thought was a night well calculated to make one think of supper and fireside, though the one might be frugal and the other lonely, and as I, Gulliver Jones, the poor foresaid Navy lieutenant, with the honoured stars of our Republic on my collar, and an undeserved snub from those in authority rankling in my heart, picked my way homeward by a short cut through ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... marriage, the Barrys were apprised of their success regarding the Chancery-suit; but so enormous were the expenses attending it, that, after all, the benefits accruing from it were something similar to those experienced by Gulliver after his having encountered and overcome all the difficulties that could have possibly beset humanity. Still they were richer through its having been decided in their favor; and were enabled on the strength of it to purchase ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... Gulliver "into several remote regions of the world" are still as fresh and entertaining as when they were first presented to the public more than a hundred and fifty years ago. In this edition the text has been judiciously curtailed by the omission of several passages quite unsuited for the perusal ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... the outset of a passion of this kind are alarming to inexperience, and those in the way of the two lovers were very like the bonds by which the population of Lilliput throttled Gulliver, a multiplicity of nothings, which made all movement impossible, and baffle the most vehement desires. Mme. de Bargeton, for instance, must always be visible. If she had denied herself to visitors when Lucien was with her, it would have been all over with her; she might as well have run away with ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... at Aunt Suky's. Aunt Storer is not very well, but she drank tea with us, & went down to Mr Stillman's lecture in the evening. I spent the evening with Unkle & Aunt at Mrs Rogers's. Mr Bacon preach'd his fourth sermon from Romans iv. 6. My cousin Charles Storer lent me Gulliver's Travels abreviated, which aunt says I may read for the sake of perfecting myself in reading a variety of composures. she sais farther that the piece was desin'd as a burlesque upon the times in ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... tells the mob the Tower is a second Bastile; let it be pulled down. A mob tries to pull down the Tower; but Thistlewood is at the head of that mob; he is not peeping from a garret on Tower Hill like Gulliver at Lisbon. Thistlewood and Ings say to twenty ragged individuals, Liverpool and Castlereagh are two satellites of despotism; it would be highly desirable to put them out of the way. And a certain number of ragged individuals are surprised in a stable in Cato Street, making preparations to ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... effect, settling all relations of life, with reference to a system of intricate symbolical riddles? These things are exceedingly difficult for a modern to realise; we feel as though we had penetrated into some Gulliver's world or kingdom of the Moon; for theology and its methods have been relegated, these many hundred years, to a sort of Hortus inclusus where nothing human grows. These mediaeval men of science apply their scientific energies to mastering, collecting, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... whenever he had an opportunity of doing so. It is a mistake to suppose that he was indifferent to literary fame: on the contrary, he kept some of his works in manuscript for years in order to perfect them for publication, of which "The Tale of a Tub," "Gulliver's Travels," and the "Verses on his own ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... and modest; but the Yankee diplomats are the most scrutinized and conspicuous persons to be seen. One of the secretaries said to me: "I am afraid to wander off by myself among these ladies: they inspect me as the maids of honor in the palace of Brobdingnag did Gulliver. I feel toward Columbia as a cruel mother who won't dress me like these other little boys." It would require more than ordinary courage to attempt to dance in this rig. I should think that our representatives would huddle together in the most unconspicuous portion of a room, and never ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... unlooked-for appearance on these excursions of the tall man in the blue serge suit, whose knowledge of the national game and of other matters of vital import to youth was gratifying if sometimes disconcerting; who towered, an unruffled Gulliver, over their Lilliputian controversies, in which bats were waved and fists brought into play and language used on the meaning of which the Century dictionary is silent. On one former occasion, indeed, Mr. Bentley had found moral suasion, affection, and veneration of no ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... XII., and a better book for a boy has never been written. Then he fell upon the Spectator. Before he was twelve he had read the Arabian Nights, Orlando, Robinson Crusoe, Smollett's Works, Reynard the Fox, Don Quixote, Gil Bias, Tom Jones, Gulliver, Shakespeare, Plutarch's Lives, Pope's Homer, Goldsmith's Rome, Percy's Reliques, Thomson's Seasons, Young, Gray, and Chatterton,—a gallon of sack to a penny's worth of bread. A good steady drill in arithmetic, geography, and language ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... always after that, the man was very polite when he brought his presents. And the Dean also took the hint; for he always remembered to give the man a "tip" for his trouble. Jonathan Swift, often called Dean Swift, was famous as a writer on many subjects. Among other books he wrote "Gulliver's Travels," which you, perhaps, will read ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin
... concerning the possibility of a passage thither." These two works differ in several essential particulars:—in Dr. Goodwin's, we have men of enormous stature and prodigious longevity, with a flying chariot, and some other slight points of resemblance to the Travels of Gulliver:—whilst Bishop Wilkins's is intended honestly and scientifically to prove, "that it is possible for some of our posterity to find out a conveyance to this other world; and, if there be inhabitants there, (which the Bishop, satisfactorily to himself, settles,) to ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... contained twelve books, his name on the fly-leaf of each. Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, Andersen's Fairy Tales, Arabian Nights, Life of Lincoln, Black Beauty, Oliver Twist, A Thousand Leagues under the Sea, The Pathfinder, Gulliver's Travels, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Young Ranchers comprised the selection. His eyes gleamed over the ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... of these Dutch voyages the existence of a great land somewhere to the south-east of Asia became common property to all civilised men. As an instance of this familiarity many years before Cook's epoch-making voyages, it may be mentioned that in 1699 Captain Lemuel Gulliver (in Swift's celebrated romance) arrived at the kingdom of Lilliput by steering north-west from Van Diemen's Land, which he mentions by name. Lilliput, it would thus appear, was situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of the great Bight of Australia. This ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... nations to a complicated science. If we could once get men to act out the gospel precept, "Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you," nations might burn their codes, and lawyers their statute-books. These are the hundred cords with which the Lilliputians bound Gulliver, and he escaped. If they had possessed it, or could have managed it, one cable would have been worth them all. Much has been said,—much written,—on the art of governing. Why has the simple truth been overlooked or suppressed, that the moral character of the rulers of nations ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... seen as an imitation of Gulliver's Travels. It contains many allusions. The dwarf of Saturn is Mr. Fontenelle. Despite his gentleness, his carefulness, his philosophy, all of which should endear him to Mr. Voltaire, he is linked with ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... learn bon mots by rote, and repeat them like parrots; others do not know a good thing when they meet with it, unless they are told the name of the cook. Some relish them really, but eat till they burst; others, after cramming to stupidity, would cram you from their pouch, as the monkey served Gulliver on the house-top. The whole tribe are foul feeders, at best love trash and fatten upon scraps; the worst absolutely rake the kennels, and prey on garbage. They stick with amazing tenacity, almost resembling canine fidelity and gratitude, to the remains ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Anderson's Fairy Tales. Arabian Nights. Black Beauty. Child's History of England. Grimm's Fairy Tales. Gulliver's Travels. Helen's Babies. Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare. Mother Goose, Complete. Palmer Cox's Fairy Book. Peck's Uncle Ike and the Red-Headed Boy. Pilgrim's Progress. Robinson Crusoe. Swiss Family Robinson. Tales from Scott for Young People. ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... am sure," said the Captain, when the servant entered and confuted him,—for the letter was for him. He took it up wonderingly and suspiciously, as Glumdalclitch took up Gulliver, or as (if naturalists) we take up an unknown creature that we are not quite sure will not bite and sting us. Ah! it has stung or bit you, Captain Roland; for you start and change color,—you suppress ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... We just run Swift through a coarse sieve to take out the lumps of Seventeenth Century refuse, and then we give him to children to make them laugh. Surely no better use can be made of pessimists. Verily, the author of Gulliver wrote for one purpose, and we use his work for another. He wished for office, he got contempt; he tried to subdue his enemies, they subdued him; he worked for the present, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... But instead of being the most free, the most independent, the most individualistic force in the world, it has become the most authoritarian, the most traditional, the most rigid of systems. As in the tale of Gulliver, it is a giant indeed, and can yet perform gigantic services; but it is bound and ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Arabian Nights Swift's Gulliver's Travels Defoe's Robinson Crusoe Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield Cervantes' Don Quixote Boswell's Life of Johnson Moliere Schiller's William Tell Sheridan's The Critic, School for Scandal, and The Rivals Carlyle's Past ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... use of the realistic method alone denoted the Novel, Defoe, not Richardson, might be called its begetter. "Robinson Crusoe," more than twenty years before "Pamela," would occupy the primate position, to say nothing of Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," antedating Richardson's first story by some fifteen years. Certainly the observational method, the love of detail, the grave narrative of imagined fact (if the bull be permitted) are in this earlier ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... contrived in some unexplained way to elude so long as he lived. In October, 1787, he left school for St. John's College, Cambridge. He was already, we are told, a fair Latin scholar, and had made some progress in mathematics. The earliest books we hear of his reading were Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Gulliver's Travels, and the Tale of a Tub; but at school he had also become familiar with the works of some English poets, particularly Goldsmith and Gray, of whose poems he had learned many by heart. What is more ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... run, and prayed the House to provide a remedy". In 1747 there flourished at Poole a notorious band of smugglers known as the "Hawkhurst Gang", and towards the close of the same century a famous smuggler named Gulliver had a favourite landing-place for his cargoes at Branksome Chine, whence his pack-horses made their way through the New Forest to London and the Midlands, or travelled westward across Crichel Down to Blandford, Bath, ...
— Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch • Sidney Heath
... bag, rush away from Sulaco for a change of air and write a few pages of the "Mirror of the Sea." But generally, as I've said before, my sojourn on the Continent of Latin America, famed for its hospitality, lasted for about two years. On my return I found (speaking somewhat in the style of Captain Gulliver) my family all well, my wife heartily glad to learn that the fuss was all over, and our small boy considerably grown ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Looking-Glass. Palmer Cox's Fairy Book. Andersen's Fairy Tales. Peck's Uncle Ike and the Red-Headed Arabian Nights. Boy. Black Beauty. Pilgrim's Progress. Child's History of England. Robinson Crusoe. Grimm's Fairy Tales. Swiss Family Robinson. Gulliver's Travels. Tales from Scott for Young People. Helen's Babies. Tom Brown's School Days. Lamb's Tales from ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... (4) and the right to invoke such interest has, ever since, been maintained by Romance through all varieties of form and fancy,—from the majestic epopee of "Telemaque" to the graceful fantasies of "Undine," or the mighty mockeries of "Gulliver's Travels" down to such comparatively commonplace elements of wonder as yet preserve from oblivion "The Castle of Otranto" ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... spite of the rumour that we were to be treking again this morning, we are still here. I will endeavour to give you the usual veracious account of our doings. I say "veracious" advisedly, as oftentimes, after having seen something extra strong in the Ananias-Sapphira-Munchausen-Gulliver-de-Rougemont epistolary line from some gentleman in khaki to the old folks at home, in a London or provincial paper, I feel that I must give up letter writing altogether, as by now those at home must have discovered ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... Chamisso's Alsatian legend, "Das Riesenspielzeug," "The Giant's Toy," usually called in English translations "The Giant's Daughter and the Peasant." The girl in the poem seems to have far exceeded even the Kalevide in stature; and we may remember Gulliver's remark respecting the Brobdingnagians—"Who knows but that even this prodigious race of mortals might be equally overmatched in some distant part of the world whereof we have ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... well, and the next question is, whether it works well. We cannot but remember the coat made for Mr. Gulliver by the Laputan tailors, which, though projected from the most refined geometrical data and the most profound calculations, he found to be the worst fit he ever put on his back. We must ask those who have eaten the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... John. P. Gulliver, of Norwich, Connecticut, has given a most interesting reminiscence of Lincoln's speech in that city while on his tour through New England. On the morning following the speech he met Lincoln on a railroad train, and entered into conversation with him. ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... fearing you would render them useless by simplifying the Christian philosophy, the most sublime and benevolent but most perverted system that ever shone on man, endeavored to crush your well-earned and well-deserved fame. But it was the Lilliputians upon Gulliver. Our countrymen have recovered from the alarm into which art and industry had thrown them; science and honesty are replaced on their high ground; and you, my dear Sir, as their great apostle, are on its pinnacle. It is with heartfelt satisfaction that, in the first moments of my public ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... spell they've laid upon you? You make me think of Gulliver... a giant stretched out upon the ground, impotent, bound fast with a million tiny threads! Wake up, man... wake up! You've only one life to live. You act as if you ...
— The Naturewoman • Upton Sinclair
... bud, and the slow passing of the years. It is right that the children should devour fairy stories, and she, who, at this period of life, fails to read the Arabian Nights, must miss forever a most valuable part of her mental education: for this period, once past, never returns. Don Quixote and Gulliver's Travels may be also mentioned here. It is true that they were not written for children, but so true and genuine are they, that the child enjoys them thoroughly, while the most mature find them a profitable study. This peculiarity of adaptation to all ages belongs to all the genuine myths of any ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... was Swift, born in Ireland, in 1677, educated at Dublin, and patronized by Sir William Temple. He was rewarded, finally, with the deanery of St. Patrick's. He was very useful to his party by his political writings; but his fame rests chiefly on his poetry, and his Gulliver's Travels, marked and disgraced by his savage sarcasm on woman, and his vilification of human nature. He was a great master of venomous satire. He spared neither friends nor enemies. He was ambitious, misanthropic ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... remarkable passage in his life which is worth repeating here, since it gives an insight into the thoroughness of this man. The following is quoted from the Rev. J. P. Gulliver, then pastor of the Congregational church in Norwich, Conn. It was a part of a conversation which took place shortly after the Cooper Institute speech in 1860, and was printed in The Independent ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... Travels, Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, is my ancient and intimate friend; there is likewise some relation between us on the mother's side. About three years ago, Mr. Gulliver growing weary of the concourse of curious people coming to him at his house in Redriff, made a small purchase of land, with a convenient ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... the minutest drop of blood, any one of the camel family can be surely distinguished from all other animals, even from its allies among the ruminants; and what is more to our purpose, in pursuing this inquiry, Mr. Gulliver has found that the blood-corpuscles of the dog and wolf agree exactly, while those of all the true foxes are slightly ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... will tell us something about his travels. He is quite a traveller, you know," she said to the Plows. "A regular Gulliver." ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... Paper On Drawings of the Statues of Apollo, Venus, and Hercules On Bentley's 'Milton' Lines written in Windsor Forest To Erinna A Dialogue Ode to Quinbus Flestrin The Lamentation of Glumdalclitch for the Loss of Grildrig To Mr Lemuel Gulliver Mary Gulliver to Captain Lemuel Gulliver 1740, a Fragment of a Poem The Fourth Epistle of the First Book of Horace Epigram on one who made long Epitaphs On an Old Gate A Fragment To Mr Gay Argus Prayer of Brutus Lines on a ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... generally regarded by critics as a selfish and heartless man; and his treatment of the two women whose affections he had gained was certainly inexplicable and detestable. His old age was miserable and sad. He died insane, having survived his friends and his influence. But his writings have lived. His "Gulliver's Travels" is still one of the most famous and popular books in our language, in spite of its revolting and vulgar details. Swift, like Addison, was a great master of style,—clear, forcible, and natural; and in vigor he surpassed any writer ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... Mr. Goodchild never divested himself of this idea. Every day he looked out of window, with something of the dread of Lemuel Gulliver looking down at men after he returned home from the horse-country; and every day he saw the Lunatics, horse-mad, betting-mad, drunken-mad, vice-mad, and the designing Keepers always after them. The idea pervaded, like the second colour in shot-silk, the whole of Mr. ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... most interesting reminiscence of Lincoln's speech in that city while on his tour through New England. On the morning following the speech he met Lincoln on a railroad train, and entered into conversation with him. In speaking of his speech, Mr. Gulliver remarked to Lincoln that he thought it the most remarkable one he ever heard. "Are you sincere in what you say?" inquired Lincoln. "I mean every word of it," replied the minister; "indeed, I learned more of the art of public speaking last evening than I could from a whole course of lectures ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... to me. I got the best of everything. But being nice to me was not enough; it sort of made me feel like Gulliver in Brobdingnag. They were so over-strong that they did not know their own strength. This was especially true of the youngsters of Mekstrom parents. I tried to re-diaper a baby one night and got my ring finger gummed for my efforts. It was like wrestling ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... shot flame on the Seehorn. A more crystalline night, more full of fulgent stars, was never seen, stars everywhere, but mostly scattered in large sparkles on the snow. Big Christian went in front, tugging toboggans by their strings, as Gulliver, in some old woodcut, drew the fleets of Lilliput. Through the brown wood-chalets of Selfrangr, up to the undulating meadows, where the snow slept pure and crisp, he led us. There we sat awhile and drank the clear air, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Travels into several remote nations of the world. In four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships. London, for B.Motte, 1726. 2 ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... as it so often bore Caesar and his fortunes, and our surgeon and his fat, deserves and shall have a more than passing notice. It was perhaps one of the smallest crafts that ever braved the seas. Such a floating miniature you may have conceived Gulliver to be placed in, when he was sighed across the tub of water by his Brobdignag princess. Woefully and timorously, many's the time and oft did the obese doctor eye it from the gangway; when asking for a boat, the first-lieutenant, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... in a fairy-tale, the motive of the Passion of Lear in the other four acts is not only adequate out overwhelming. Othello breaks free from mechanism of Plot in a similar way. Shakespeare as a writer of the fiction of human nature was as supreme among his contemporaries as was Gulliver among ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... curious fact that of that class of literature to which Munchausen belongs, that namely of Voyages Imaginaires, the three great types should have all been created in England. Utopia, Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver, illustrating respectively the philosophical, the edifying, and the satirical type of fictitious travel, were all written in England, and at the end of the eighteenth century a fourth type, the fantastically mendacious, was evolved in this country. Of this type Munchausen ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... the Great Fire fully proved, when he is said to have boasted that he would extinguish the flames by the same means to which Swift tells us Gulliver had ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... went on, sort o' apologizin', "He had always meant to read it through. But he had entered political life at an early age, and he believed he had never read any more of it, only portions of Gulliver's Travels. He believed," he said, "he had ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... now rests largely upon his Gulliver's Travels, which appeared in 1726 under the title, "Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon and then a Captain of Several Ships." In the first voyage we are taken to Lilliput, a country inhabited by human beings about six inches tall, with minds in proportion. The capers of these midgets are a satire on human society, as seen through Swift's scornful eyes. In the second ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... of books on the Roman empire and he has other hundreds of volumes waiting to be read. But somehow he has never thought of sending me back my shabby old Gibbon. And that was the way with my Montaigne—gone. And here were two editions of Gulliver. I lent one to a nephew of the Harringtons and the other to a rather prim young lady from Boston who impressed me as having had too much Emerson. My Shelley is gone. My 'Rousseau's Confessions' is also gone." And Cooper smiled ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... date. It is ascribed by Plutarch to Pigres, the brother of the Halicarnassian Queen, Artemisia, contemporary with the Persian War. This poem, which is a parody on Homer, reminds us, in its microscopic representation of human affairs, of the travels of Gulliver in Lilliput. A frog offers to give a mouse a ride across the water on his back. Unfortunately, a water-snake lifts up its head when they are in the middle passage, and the frog diving to avoid the danger, the mouse is drowned. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... interest in the book than that which arises from its good-humoured flagellation of Persian peccadilloes. Just as no one who is unacquainted with the history and leading figures of the period can properly appreciate Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," or "Gulliver's Travels," so no one who has not sojourned in Persia, and devoted considerable study to contemporary events, can form any idea of the extent to which "Hajji Baba" is a picture of actual personages, and a record of veritable facts. ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... miscellaneous writings of John Evelyn, the diary-writer, there is an account of this extraordinary impostor, whose narration of his own adventures outshines that of Munchausen, and whose experiences, according to his own showing, were more remarkable than those of Gulliver. In 1668 this marvellous personage published a book entitled the "History of Mohammed Bey; or, John Michel de Cigala, Prince of the Imperial Blood of the Ottomans." This work he dedicated to the French king, who was ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... of the impetuous Panama sun were spattering from them when I passed again the jumbled rows of invalided locomotives and machinery, reddish with rust and bound, like Gulliver, by green jungle strands and tropical creepers. By day the arch-roofed labor-camps were silent and empty, but for a lonely janitor languidly mopping a floor. Before the buildings a black gang was dipping the canvas and gas-pipe ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... piece of fiction drew its "local colour" from the South American region, not from any supposed land in the neighbourhood of the Australian continent. The instance is all the more interesting from the possibility that the book may have given a hint to Swift in the writing of Gulliver's Travels.* (* See the Cambridge History of English Literature 9 106; where, however, the English translation is erroneously cited as Journey ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... not suit his purpose, all history must be ransacked. If nothing established by authentic testimony can be racked or chipped to suit his Procrustean hypothesis, he puts up with some monstrous fable about Siam, or Bantam, or Japan, told by writers compared with whom Lucian and Gulliver were veracious, liars by a double right, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... at hunting and trapping in order to discharge his debts and provide for his family. Near the mouth of Red River the new party built their station camp. Here, in idle hours, Neely read aloud from a copy of "Gulliver's Travels" to entertain the hunters while they dressed their deerskins or tinkered their weapons. In honor of the "Lorbrulgrud" of the book, though with a pronunciation all their own, they christened the nearest creek; and as "Lulbegrud Creek" it is ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... put down on their first appearance, or corn is not to be expected; "the poor corn-plant, if left to itself, will soon be like Gulliver when bound down by the Lilliputians." The hoe is the instrument to be used on this occasion, and then the plough; the latter operation is repeated twice; two double ploughings are the death of weeds, and the life of the plants; the first takes place when the corn is from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 383, August 1, 1829 • Various
... sent to demand her picture and other presents. "Other presents," to be sure, were billet-doux, bracelets woven of her own bristles-for I look upon the hair of a Muscovite Majesty in the light of the chairs which Gulliver made out of the combings of the Empress of Brobdignag's tresses: the stumps he made into very good large-tooth combs. You know the present is a very Amazon. she has grappled with all her own grenadiers. I should like to see their loves woven into a French opera: ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... exquisite sensations of love in proportion as they were beautiful, or rich, or endowed with talent (according to a standard), our world would have been even more queer than that kingdom described by Gulliver, where the ugliest individual ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... with age and twisted and fully grown, but no higher than your knee. It is all so delicate and dainty and tiny that we are afraid to walk in it for fear we should spoil it; we feel thoroughly big and clumsy as Gulliver must have felt among the Lilliputians, and we expect every minute to see the rightful owners, wee men and women the size of a man's fingers, rushing out from the little summer-house with the curved roof at the end, and crying shrilly to us ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... hearing. Above all, do not underrate the question. Let not the balance of your understanding be so upset by ephemeral childishness as to fancy that it matters much whether you break an egg top or bottom, because Gulliver's two nations went to war about it; or that it matters much whether your queen is called queen of India or empress, because two parties made a noise about it, and the country has wasted ten thousand square miles of good paper on the subject, trivial as the dust on a butterfly's wing. ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... Girls," in which certain wood creatures are supposed to make a scientific excursion into a place at some time occupied by men. It is the most pretentious feature of the book, and in its way about as good as any. Like Gulliver's Travels, its object was satire, but its result is ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... was the beginning of Gulliver his travels, that being told for a child's pleasure hath since become a world's wonder. It had not then the meanings he gave it later, ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... Athens, who has since become am elegant and charming poet, Albert Glatigny. Albert Glatigny cried out to this frightened Viscount, "Hulloa there! Do you think that coups d'etat are extinguished in the way Gulliver put out the fire?" ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... was a great gathering of the Tory wits at Twickenham. Swift had come from Ireland, and resided for some time with Pope. Bolingbroke came over occasionally from Dawley; and Gay was often there to laugh with, and be laughed at by, the rest. Swift had "Gulliver's Travels"—the most ingenious and elaborate libel against man and God ever written—in his pocket, nearly ready for publication; and we may conceive the grim, sardonic smile with which he read it to his friends, ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... found himself bound (page 10), he felt something alive moving on his body. Bending his eyes downward as much as he could he saw it was a human creature not six inches high. We are at liberty to suppose that Gulliver was a man of ordinary height, that is to say, not six feet high. If the Lilliputian was "not six inches high," what was the ratio of height between Gulliver and his miniature captors? If, then, Gulliver ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... friend Moore's Lalla Rookh should be selected from the whole mass of English poetry to be prize books. I will engage to frame, currente calamo, a better list. Bacon's Essays, Hume's England, Gibbon's Rome, Robertson's Charles V., Robertson's Scotland, Robertson's America, Swift's Gulliver, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare's Works, Paradise Lost, Milton's smaller poems, Arabian Nights, Park's Travels, Anson's Voyage, the Vicar of Wakefield, Johnson's Lives, Gil Blas, Voltaire's Charles XII., Southey's ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... ties in Swift's surgeon Gulliver, through the "Pancake of Rabbets" (Dumpling, p. 17), with the topical and notorious case of Mary Tofts, who in November 1726 was "delivered" of fifteen rabbits. All the people mentioned were connected with this case. Nathaniel St. Andre was the surgeon and anatomist to the ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... Canada, visiting in my way the celebrated town of Stamford. On a level spot of grass, at the foot of the guidepost, appeared an object, which, though locomotive on a different principle, reminded me of Gulliver's portable mansion among the Brobdignags. It was a huge covered wagon, or, more properly, a small house on wheels, with a door on one side and a window shaded by green blinds on the other. Two horses, munching provender out of the baskets which muzzled them, were fastened near the ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... superiour to his other writings, that one can hardly believe he was the authour of it: 'there is in it such a vigour of mind, such a swarm of thoughts, so much of nature, and art, and life.' I wondered to hear him say of Gulliver's Travels, 'When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.' I endeavoured to make a stand for Swift, and tried to rouse those who were much more able to defend him; but in vain. Johnson at last, of his own accord, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell |
