me air and show me the country; but always held me
fast by a leading-string. We passed over five or six rivers, many
degrees broader and deeper than the Nile or the Ganges; and there was
hardly a rivulet so small as the Thames at London Bridge. We were ten
weeks in our journey, and I was shown in eighteen large towns, besides
many villages and private families.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 110: From the description of the Academy of Lagade in
"Gulliver's Travels."]

[Footnote 111: From No. 1 of "The Tatler."]

[Footnote 112: From "The Examiner."]

[Footnote 113: This essay is a satire on the writings of Robert
Boyle.]

[Footnote 114: From "Gulliver's Travels." At this point in the story
Gulliver, shipwrecked in the country of Brobdingnag, had by the farmer
who found him been given as a plaything to his little daughter
Glumdalclitch, who, altho only nine years old, was forty feet tall.]

JOSEPH ADDISON

Born in 1672, died in 1719; educated at Oxford, where he
wrote a Latin poem which brought him a pension of three
hundred pounds; traveled on the Continent in 1699-1703;
Under-secretary of State in 1706; Secretary to the Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland in 1709; Secretary for Ireland in
1715; Secretary of State in 1717; married the Countess of
Warwick in 1716; for his periodical _The Spectator_,
published daily from March 1st, 1711, to December 6th, 1712,
wrote 274 papers; including the Sir Roger de Coverley
papers; author of many other writings, among which "Cato: A
Tragedy" is notable.

I

IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY[115]

When I am in a serious humor, I very often walk by myself in
Westminster Abbey; where the gloominess of the place, and the use to
which it is applied, with the solemnity of the building, and the
condition of the people who lie in it, are apt to fill the mind with a
kind of melancholy, or rather thoughtfulness, that is not
disagreeable. I yesterday passed a whole afternoon in the churchyard,
the cloisters, and the church, amusing myself with the tombstones and
inscriptions that I met with in those several regions of the dead.
Most of them recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that he
was born upon one day, and died upon another: the whole history of his
life being comprehended in those two circumstances, that are common
to all mankind. I could not but look upon these registers of
existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind