Gulliver’S Travels Into Several Remote Nations Of The World

I hope you will be ready to own publicly whenever you shall be called to it that by your great and frequent urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect account of my travels with directions to hire some young gentleman of either university to put them in order and correct the style as my cousin Dampier did by my advice in his book called “A Voyage round the world.” But I do not remember I gave you power to consent that any thing should be omitted and much less that any thing should be inserted; therefore as to the latter I do here renounce every thing of that kind; particularly a paragraph about her majesty Queen Anne of most pious and glorious memory; although I did reverence and esteem her more than any of human species. But you or your interpolator ought to have considered that it was not my inclination so was it not decent to praise any animal of our composition before my master Houyhnhnm: And besides the fact was altogether false; for to my knowledge being in England during some part of her majesty’s reign she did govern by a chief minister; nay even by two successively the first whereof was the lord of Godolphin and the second the lord of Oxford; so that you have made me say the thing that was not. Likewise in the account of the academy of projectors and several passages of my discourse to my master Houyhnhnm you have either omitted some material circumstances or minced or changed them in such a manner that I do hardly know my own work.