After this business is pretty well established, he has promised to put a friend on another project almost as good as this, by establishing insurance offices everywhere for securing people from shipwreck and several other accidents in their voyage to this country; and these officers shall furnish, at a certain rate, pilots well versed in the route, and that know all the rocks, shelves, quicksands, &c., that such pilgrims and travellers may be exposed to. Of these he knows a great number ready instructed in most countries; but the whole scheme of this matter he is to draw up at large and communicate to his friend. FOOTNOTES. {50} The number of livings in England.—_Pate_. {51a} “Distinguished, new, told by no other tongue.”—_Horace_. {51b} “Reading prefaces, &c.”—_Swift’s note in the margin_. {56a} Plutarch.—_Swift’s note in the margin_. {56b} Xenophon.—_Swift’s note in the margin_, _marked_, _in future_, _S_. {56c} Spleen.—_Horace_. {59} “But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labour lies.” —_Dryden’s_ “_Virgil_” {60} “That the old may withdraw into safe ease.” {61} In his subsequent apology for “The Tale of a Tub,” Swift wrote of these machines that, “In the original manuscript there was a description of a fourth, which those who had the papers in their power blotted out, as having something in it of satire that I suppose they thought was too particular; and therefore they were forced to change it to the number three, whence some have endeavoured to squeeze out a dangerous meaning that was never thought on. And indeed the conceit was half spoiled by changing the numbers; that of four being much more cabalistic, and therefore better exposing the pretended virtue of numbers, a superstition then intended to be ridiculed.” {62a} “Under the rainy sky, in the meetings of three and of four ways.” {62b} Lucretius, lib. 2.—S. {62c} “’Tis certain, then, the voice that thus can wound; Is all material body, every sound.” {63} To be burnt or worm-eaten. {64} The Royal Society first met at Gresham College, the resort of men of science. Will’s Coffee-House was the resort of wits and men of letters. {65a} Viz., about moving the earth.—S. {65b} “Virtuoso experiments and modern comedies.”—S. {67a} He lived a thousand.—S. {67b} Viz., in the year 1697.—S. Dryden died in 1700, and the publication of the “Tale of a Tub,” written in 1697, was not until 1704. {69a} The title-page in the original was so torn that it was not possible to recover several titles which the author here speaks of.—S. {69b} See Virgil translated, &c.—S.