Page:LuciansTrueHistory (Hickes).djvu/29

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INTRODUCTION.
xxiii

for, while Epistemon's descent into Hell was certainly suggested by Lucian, Pantagruel's voyage is an ample travesty of The True History, and Lanternland, the home of the Lychnobii, is but Lychnopolis, Lucian's own City of Lights. The seventeenth century discovered another imitator in Cyrano de Bergerac, whose tepid Voyage dans la Lune is interesting merely because it is a link in the chain that unites Lucian with Swift. Yet the book had an immense popularity, and Cyrano's biographer has naught to say of the original traveller, save that he told his story "avec beaucoup moins de vraisemblance et de gentilesse d'imagination que M. de Bergerac." An astounding judgment surely, which time has already reversed. And then came Gulliver's Travels, incomparably the greatest descendant of The True History. To what excellent purpose Swift followed his Lucian is proved alike by the amazing probability of his narrative,