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.

CHAPTER VIII.

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