D.C. Heath & Co., Publishers
Boston New York Chicago

1900




PREFACE.

And lo! the book, from all its end beguiled,
A harmless wonder to some happy child.

LORD LYTTON.


Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726; and, although it was by no
means intended for them, the book was soon appropriated by the children,
who have ever since continued to regard it as one of the most delightful
of their story books. They cannot comprehend the occasion which provoked
the book nor appreciate the satire which underlies the narrative, but
they delight in the wonderful adventures, and wander full of open-eyed
astonishment into the new worlds through which the vivid and logically
accurate imagination of the author so personally conducts them. And
there is a meaning and a moral in the stories of the Voyages to Lilliput
and Brobdingnag which is entirely apart from the political satire they