in Robinson Crusoe. No sooner were the Travels published than they were discussed gravely as a record of actual happenings. An Irish bishop, taking the view that was expected of him, said that the book was full of improbable lies, and that for his part he hardly believed a word of it. But it was Arbuthnot who sent to Swift the best news of his Travels. He prophesied truly for the book as great a run as John Bunyan, and he gave gratifying examples of its literal acceptance. "Lord Scarborough," he wrote, "who is no inventor of stories, told me that he fell in company with a master of a ship, who told him that he was very well acquainted with Gulliver, but that the printer had been mistaken, that he lived in Wapping, not in Rotherhithe. I lent the book to an old gentleman who went immediately to his map to search for Lilliput." The simplicity of the Irish bishop, the master of the ship, and the old gentleman, proved to Swift that he had not failed in the art of verisimilitude, and explains for us why Gulliver after two centuries is still the delight of children.
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