Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 17.djvu/79

Rh but from whom they first received them is yet a secret. The highest period of time, to which the learned attempt to trace them, is the beginning of the Assyrian monarchy, when their inventors were worshipped as Gods. It is therefore necessary to go backward into times even more remote, and to gain some knowledge of their history, from whatever dark and broken hints may any way be found in ancient authors concerning them.

Nor Troy nor Thebes were the first of empires; we have mention, though not histories, of an earlier warlike people called the Pygmæans. I cannot but persuade myself, from those accounts in Homer, Aristotle, and others, of their history, wars and revolutions, and from the very air in which those authors speak of them as of things known, that they were then a part of the study of the learned. And though all we directly hear is of their military achievements, in the brave defence of their country from the annual invasions of a powerful enemy, yet I cannot doubt, but that they excelled as much in the arts of peaceful government; though there remain no traces of their civil institutions. Empires as great have been swallowed up in the wreck of time, and such sudden periods have been put to them, as occasion a total ignorance of their story. And if I should conjecture, that the like happened to this nation from a general extirpation of the people by those flocks of monstrous birds, wherewith antiquity agrees they were continually infested; it ought not to seem more incredible, than that one of the Baleares was wasted by rabbits, Smynthe by mice, and of late das