iv., v., and vi. (pp. 10-44) of the present reprint. These chapters are
the best in the book and their substantial if peculiar merit can hardly
be denied, but the pamphlet appears to have met with little success,
and early in 1786 Smith seems to have sold the property to another
bookseller, Kearsley. Kearsley had it enlarged, but not, we are
expressly informed, in the preface to the seventh edition, by the hand
of the original author (who happened to be in Cornwall at the time). He
also had it illustrated and brought it out in the same year in book
form at the enhanced price of two shillings, under the title: "Gulliver
Reviv'd: The Singular Travels, Campaigns, Voyages and Sporting
Adventures of Baron Munnikhouson commonly pronounced Munchausen; as he
relates them over a bottle when surrounded by his friends. A new edition
considerably enlarged with views from the Baron's drawings. London.
1786." A well-informed _Critical Reviewer_ would have amended the title
thus: "Lucian reviv'd: or Gulliver Beat with his own Bow."
Four editions now succeeded each other with rapidity and without
modification. A German translation appeared in 1786 with the imprint
London: it was, however, in reality printed by Dieterich at Goettingen.
It was a free rendering of the fifth edition, the preface being a clumsy
combination of that prefixed to the original edition with that which
Kearsley had added to the third.
The fifth edition (which is, with the exception of trifling differences
on the title-page, identical with the third, fourth, and sixth) is
also that which has been followed in the present reprint down to the
conclusion of chapter twenty, where it ends with the words "the great
quadrangle." The supplement treating of Munchausen's extraordinary
flight on the back of an eagle over France to Gibraltar, South and North
America, the Polar Regions, and back to England is derived from the
seventh edition of 1793, which has a new sub-title:--"Gulliver reviv'd,
or the Vice of Lying properly exposed." The preface to this enlarged
edition also informs the reader that the last four editions had met with
extraordinary success, and that the supplementary chapters, all, that
is, with the exception of chapters ii., iii., iv., v., and vi., which
are ascribed to Baron Munchausen himself, were the production of another
pen, written, however, in the Baron's manner. To the same ingenious
person the public was indebted for the engravings with which the book
was embellished. The seventh was the last edition by which the classic
text of Munchausen was seriously modified. Even before this important
consummation had been arrived at, a sequel, which was within a fraction
as long as the original work (it occupies pp. 163-299 of this volume),
had appeared under the title, "A Sequel to the Adventures of Baron
Munchausen. . . . Humbly dedicated to Mr. Bruce the Abyssinian
traveller, as the Baron conceives that it may be some service to him,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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