s_ abounding in virtue, honour,
truth, and good sense; courts and levees of great ministers thoroughly
weeded and swept; wit, merit, and learning rewarded; all disgracers of
the press in prose and verse condemned to eat nothing but their own
cotton, and quench their thirst with their own ink. These, and a
thousand other reformations, I firmly counted upon by your encouragement;
as indeed they were plainly deducible from the precepts delivered in my
book. And it must be owned, that seven months were a sufficient time to
correct every vice and folly to which _Yahoos_ are subject, if their
natures had been capable of the least disposition to virtue or wisdom.
Yet, so far have you been from answering my expectation in any of your
letters; that on the contrary you are loading our carrier every week with
libels, and keys, and reflections, and memoirs, and second parts; wherein
I see myself accused of reflecting upon great state folk; of degrading
human nature (for so they have still the confidence to style it), and of
abusing the female sex. I find likewise that the writers of those
bundles are not agreed among themselves; for some of them will not allow
me to be the author of my own travels; and others make me author of books
to which I am wholly a stranger.

I find likewise that your printer has been so careless as to confound the
times, and mistake the dates, of my several voyages and returns; neither
assigning the true year, nor the true month, nor day of the month: and I
hear the original manuscript is all destroyed since the publication of my
book; neither have I any copy left: however, I have sent you some
corrections, which you may insert, if ever there should be a second
edition: and yet I cannot stand to them; but shall leave that matter to
my judicious and candid readers to adjust it as they please.

I hear some of our sea _Yahoos_ find fault with my sea-language, as not
proper in many parts, nor now in use. I cannot help it. In my first
voyages, while I was young, I was instructed by the oldest mariners, and
learned to speak as they did. But I have since found that the sea
_Yahoos_ are apt, like the land ones, to become new-fangled in their
words, which the latter change every year; insomuch, as I remember upon
each return to my own country their old dialect was so altered, that I
could hardly understand the new. And I observe, when any _Yahoo_ comes
from London out of curiosity to visit me at my house, we