The notes signed W. Wotton' 'W. Wotton' are a humorous revenge on the Tale's chief critic. In 1705 William Wotton brought out a third edition of his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning and added as an appendix A Defense of the Reflections... With Observations upon The Tale of a Tub. Swift's 'Apology' is largely an answer to these Observations. But in the course of his hostile remarks Wotton explained a large number of difficulties in the allegory. These explanations were inserted, word for word, in the new notes, and thus the critic was turned into the 'learned commentator'." The Illustrations. The eight illustrations which were first included in the fifth edition are likewise referred to in the letters of Swift to Tooke. 'I dare say', wrote Swift, 'you have neither printed the rest, nor finished the cuts'; to which Tooke replied, 'as to the cuts, Sir Andrew Fountaine has had them from the time they were designed, with an intent of altering them. But he is now gone into Norfolk, and will not return till Michaelmas; so that, I think, they must be laid aside; for, unless they are very well done, it is better they were quite let alone'. During the summer and autumn of 1709 Swift had been in active correspondence with Fountaine. Unfortunately none of their letters at this time have been preserved. It is no rash assumption that they would have supplemented the little that is known about the illustrations, and would have shown that Swift had the advice, and perhaps the active collaboration, of one of the greatest art critics and collectors of the day. But if the letters are lost the original designs to which P. 73, note t. 2 PP. 343, 4. Compare Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, vol. v, P. 253. 3 See Swift's List of Letters Nov. 1708 to Nov. 1709 in Cor- Tooke refers are preserved at Narford Hall, the seat of the Fountaine family in Norfolk. They were found in a drawer in 1831, and were then inserted in the magnificent large-paper copy of the Tale which Sir Andrew Fountaine had received in 1710. By the courtesy of Captain C. A. Fountaine, R.N., they are reproduced in the present edition, and at last serve the purpose for which they were intended, side by side with the inferior illustrations which were allowed to take their place.' The eight engravings published with the Tale were produced by Bernard Lens and John Sturt, who at this time kept a drawing-school in St. Paul's Churchyard. Only the frontispiece is signed 'B. Lens delin: J. Sturt sculp.' The absence of any name on the other seven plates and the differences in the workmanship cannot be taken to mean that Lens and Sturt were not responsible for all. The engavings had probably been distributed among their draughtsmen or assistants. In books of this period a signature is often found only on the first of a series of cuts. The engravings as a whole are disappointing. Most of them are flat journeywork. The details in some are interesting, such as the 'stage itinerant' inset in the Preaching scene; but in others, as in. the frontispiece to the Battle of the Books, they are not all relevant to the text. Even the signed frontispiece to the Tale follows a traditional design in the build of the ship, and a conventional dolphin does service as a whale. The original designs are likewise eight in number, but only five correspond in subject to the engravings. 1 Captain Fountaine had just returned from service with the Grand Fleet in the North Sea when he gave every facility for the reproduction of these designs. Photographs of them had been made for John Forster when he (1875, p. 258) and are now in was writing his Life of Swift the Forster Collection in the South Kensington Museum (Swift Correspondence, Box 44 E). The reproductions are on the same scale as the originals. Three of them represent the father on his death-bed giving the will to his sons (p. 73), Peter on his throne blowing off a man's hat (p. 115), and the three brothers at table, Peter with a large goblet of wine in his right hand, and Martin and Jack on either side with crusts on their plates (p. 119). There are no designs for the ship and the whale, the Bedlam scene, or the Lord Mayor on his great horse. In the five cases where the subject corresponds, the engravings are ultimately derived from the designs; the idea has been taken, but the treatment and details differ. Even in the picture of Martin and Jack 'reforming their vestures into the primitive state' the relationship is clear, though the unfortunate change in the background may disguise it. Were the designs altered by the original artist? Or were the engravers What is certain solely responsible for the changes? is that the designs are markedly superior to the cuts in life and grip and freedom of treatment. Who drew the designs is not known. The lost correspondence of Swift and Fountaine might have told us. They cannot be ascribed to Bernard Lens ; all the specimens of his work in the British Museum are in a harder and more conventional style. There is a tradition that they were by Sir Andrew Fountaine himself. 'In 1709 his judgment and fancy', says Nichols in his Literary Anecdotes,' 'were exerted in embellishing "The Tale of a Tub " with designs almost equal to the excellent satire they illustrate', and this statement is repeated in Chalmers's Biographical Dictionary. But it may have been based on the sentence about Fountaine in Tooke's letter, which was published in 1784. The sentence is open to different interpretations. It may mean that Fountaine himself made the designs and was not satisfied with them or had to introduce 1 Vol. v, p. 253. more detail for the benefit of the engraver; or it may mean that they had been submitted to him as critic and improver. The Fountaine family does not possess any drawings that are attributed to him, and nothing has been discovered to show that he was ever a practising draughtsman. If he drew these illustrations for the Tale he was more than a great collector and virtuoso ; he was an artist of real talent. IV. THE TITLE. The phrase 'a tale of a tub' is found frequently in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sir Thomas More's use of it in his Confutacyon of Tyndale (1532) shows it to have been then a common expression." Cotgrave gives it several times in his Dictionary as synonymous with 'a flimflam', 'idle discourse', 'a tale of a roasted horse'. It has this sense as the title of Ben Jonson's comedy. It was the title also of a work entered in the Stationers' Registers on January 16, 1638, but now lost,-A Tale of a Tubb or a Gallamaufrey of Merriment. A broadsheet issued at the time of the Meal-tub Plot was headed A Tale of The Tubbs or Romes Master Peice Defeated.3 'The novelty in Swift's use of the words lies in the additional meaning. Sea-men', he explains, 'have a Custom when they meet a Whale, to fling him out an empty Tub, by way of Amusement, to divert him from laying violent Hands upon the Ship.' He writes a tale of a tub in order that the wits of his age may be diverted from sporting with the commonwealth or ship of state. Many references to this custom are to be found in sixteenth and seventeenth century literature. In Sir James Mackintosh's Life of More' it was pointed out, from information supplied by Douce, that the custom is both illustrated and described in Sebastian Münster's Cosmography (1544). This work contains a plate entitled, in the Latin version, Monstra marina & terrestria, quæ passim in partibus aquilonis inueniuntur', in the top left-hand corner of which sailors are represented throwing out barrels to a whale that is getting too near the ship; and the letterpress gives this explanation'Cete grandia ad instar montium prope Islandiam aliquando conspiciuntur, quæ naues euertunt nisi sono tubarum absterreantur, aut 'missis in mare rotundis & uacuis uasis, quorum lusu delectantur, ludificentur.' The identical plate and similar explanations are found in the German, French, and Italian versions. What is probably the earliest reference to the custom in English occurs in the little volume of extracts published in London in 1572: A Briefe Collection and compendious extract of straunge and memorable thinges, gathered oute of the Cosmographye of Sebastian Munster.3 2 At the same time as the custom was being made known throughout Europe by the different versions of Münster's Cosmography it was described also by Olaus Magnus in his Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (1 5 5 5); 'Verum malignitati eius remedio occurritur opportuno, tuba videlicet militari... ob asperum acutumque sonum, quem ferre haud potest: & magnis, ac immanibus vasis, seu doliis eiectis, cursum beluæ impedientibus, siue pro lusu ei oppositis'. The custom was soon well enough 1 1831, p. 107. * Ed. 1554, pp. 852 and 850. 1 Ed. 1572, fol. 24 v, section 'Of Whales': 'There be great Whales as big as hylles almost nighe vnto Iselande which are sometimes openly seene and those will drowne and ouerthrowe shyps, except they be made a fearde with the sound of trompets, and drums, or except some round & empty vessels be caste vnto them, wherwith they may play and sporte theym, because they are delited in playing with such thinges.' 4 Lib. xxi, cap. vii, p. 736. |