Simon Hawke: Lilliput Legion

"Go on, ask him about the little people," said Pontack, grinning and nudging Addison in the side.

"The little people?" said Joseph Addison, taking a small pinch of snuff and then sneezing prodigiously into a Mechlin lace handkerchief. "You mean the leprechauns?"

"Leprechauns?" said Richard Steele, who together with Addison published The Spectator, a daily periodical of news, essays, philosophy and gossip that was very influential among the citizens of 18th century London. "What's this about leprechauns?"

Pontack, the proprietor of the fashionable French eating house that bore his name, shook his head and chuckled. "No. not quite leprechauns, exactly," he said.

"Something a bit more original than that, near as I can tell. Something even smaller, on the order of six inches."

"Six inches?" Steele said, frowning. "What, you don't mean six inches tall, surely?"

"The very thing," said Pontack. as he conducted them to a table in the back around which a small crowd had gathered. "Six inches tall. Or so the man insists. And he swears that every word of it is true. I thought perhaps it might make for an interesting story for your paper.

"And a bit of free advertisement for your own establishment, is that it?" Steele said, with a wink at Pontack as they pressed through the crowd, "Very well, we shall ask this adventurer of yours about his leprechauns. "

"Not leprechauns," said Pontack. "Little people."

"L'il pipils," slurred a dishevelled-looking man slumped over at the table. "L'il pipils…"

His eyes were bloodshot and wild looking. His clothes were tattered and filthy and his hair stood out in all directions. His hands trembled.

"The poor man looks hopelessly demented," said Addison, with concern.

"The poor man looks hopelessly drunk," commented Steele, wryly.

"L'il ipipils.." the man stammered, having difficulty getting out the words.

"Lilliputians!" boomed a stentorian voice behind Addison and Steele. They turned around. "That's what we shall call them, gentlemen, Lilliputians!"

"Swift," said Addison, rolling his eyes. "I might have known. "

"Addison!" said Swift. "Pontack, you old poltroon, since when do you allow Whigs upon these premises?"

Addison turned to his friend and collaborator. "'Richard, allow me to present Mr.

Jonathan Swift, indefatigable champion of the Irish resistance, Tory politics, and any other lunacy that happens along. Oh, and he writes a bit, as well," he added, as an afterthought.

"Steele!" said Swift, as if it were an accusation. "I've read some of your essays."

"And I've read some of yours," said Steele. "Quite amusing. Are we witnessing another in the making?"

"Perhaps, perhaps," said Swift, evasively, elbowing some people aside and resuming his place pt the table beside the drunken man. Having made room for some more wine, he immediately started to fill up again. He had, apparently, a capacity far greater than his friend.

"Gentlemen," he said, "allow me to present Dr. Lemuel Gulliver, late of the good ship Antelope, under Capt. William Prichard, which was tragically lost at sea while en route to the East Indies. Dr. Gulliver was the ship's surgeon and the only one to have survived the disastrous shipwreck somewhere in the waters off Van

Diemen's Land."

He turned to Gulliver with an expansive gesture. "Dr. Gulliver, these two gentlemen are Messrs. Addison and Steele, late of that eminent journal of philosophical and political buffoonery, The Tatler, and currently publishing The Spectator, wherein one may find all manner of portentous nonsense concerning which nostril to stuff snuff in and the etiquette of breaking wind and whatnot.

Perhaps you would care to repeat your fascinating tale for their benefit?"

Gulliver grunted and passed out, striking his forehead on the wooden table with a resounding thud.

"Brief, but effective," Steele said, wryly.

The people standing around the table laughed, all except for one young man who stood at the edge of the crowd. He was in his early twenties, tall and well built, light haired and fair complected. He looked like any other young London dandy, but there was something about him that was different. Just prior to the arrival of Addison and Steele, he had been listening intently to Dr. Gulliver pouring out his tale as Swift poured in the booze and continued to encourage him, occasionally adding editorial embellishments of his own.

It was difficult to separate fact from fancy when it came to the whimsical Swift, but it seemed that the satirist had encountered Dr. Gulliver in a pub somewhere not very far from Pontack's in Abchurch Lane, though one that attracted a considerably less-well-heeled clientele. Swift claimed to "hate and detest that animal called man," meaning he had little use for society as a whole, but he had an affection for the common individual, the ordinary working man, and he often frequented their watering holes, ever on the alert for inspiration. In Dr. Lemuel Gulliver, he had struck the motherlode.

"Dash it all, Swift, now look what you've done!" said Pontack, indicating the unconscious and thoroughly disreputable looking Gulliver. "'I simply cannot have this sort of thing in here!"

"Indeed?" Swift said. "'My good Pontack, you have 'this sort of thing' in here all the time, only the patrons are generally better dressed and have bigger purses which you considerately lighten for them while they're resting. Here, you may lighten mine a bit if it will improve your disposition. "

Everyone laughed once more and Pontack pretended to be outrageously affronted.

"Now See here, Swift, that is most egregiously unfair-"

"Egregiously?" Swift interrupted, raising his bushy eye brows in mock astonishment. "Egregiously?" He glanced at Addison and Steele.

"He has been reading your modest little journal, hasn't he? Egregiously, my buttocks!"

This elicited another burst of laughter as Pontack sputtered and turned red in the face. Addison and Steele merely smiled at one another, thinking that the incident might indeed make for an amusing bit of reportage in their paper. And it would serve Pontack right for raising the prices on his claret. Only the dapper young man who stood at the edge of the crowd seemed unamused. His expression remained alert and sombre.

"Say what you will, Swift," Pontack said, "but I cannot have this

… this sort of person lying about senseless on my tables as if this were some seaman's tavern!

You brought him, now you must get him out of here. Take him outside and let him sleep it off in an alleyway somewhere, where his sort belongs. "

"His sort?" said Swift, with an edge in his voice. "This man is a surgeon, Pontack, a learned physician. 'His sort,' as you so disingenuously put it, keeps you and your establishment in ' business. Under other circumstances, you'd be fawning over him like the servile dog you are, because he represents the medical profession, yet because he is in tattered clothing and drunk to numb the pain of his ordeal, you so harshly and unfairly-yes, even to the point of being egregious-judge a poor unfortunate survivor of a terrible shipwreck, who has gone through God. only knows what manner of hardship. If it were not for me, you would throw this poor man into an alleyway like so much human refuse. Shame, Pontack! May you never find yourself in such a pitiable condition, lest you should encounter someone with as lime heart as you."

"Hear, hear!" said someone in the crowd, and others joined in with similar supporting comments.

"He actually did that all in one breath, didn't he?" Steele said in an aside to Addision.

"Mmmm." Addison murmured. "You ought to hear him when he really gets his wind up."