Trips to the Moon | Page 2

an edition, completed in 1711, for which Dryden had written the
author's Life. Dr. Francklin, who produced also the best eighteenth
century translation of Sophocles, joined to his translation of Lucian a

little apparatus of introductions and notes by which the English reader
is often assisted, and he has skilfully avoided the translation of
indecencies which never were of any use, and being no longer sources
of enjoyment, serve only to exclude good wit, with which, under
different conditions of life, they were associated, from the welcome due
to it in all our homes. There is a just and scholarly, as well as a
meddlesome and feeble way of clearing an old writer from
uncleannesses that cause him now to be a name only where he should
be a power. Dr. Francklin has understood his work in that way better
than Dr. Bowdler did. He does not Bowdlerise who uses pumice to a
blot, but he who rubs the copy into holes wherever he can find an
honest letter with a downstroke thicker than becomes a fine-nibbed pen.
A trivial play of fancy in one of the pieces in this volume, easily
removed, would have been as a dead fly in the pot of ointment, and
would have deprived one of Lucian's best works of the currency to
which it is entitled.
Lucian's works are numerous, and they have been translated into nearly
all the languages of Europe.
The "Instructions for Writing History" was probably one of the earliest
pieces written by him after Lucian had settled down at Samosata to the
free use of his pen, and it has been usually regarded as his best critical
work. With ridicule of the affectations of historians whose names and
whose books have passed into oblivion, he joins sound doctrine upon
sincerity of style. "Nothing is lasting that is feigned," said Ben Jonson;
"it will have another face ere long." Long after Lucian's day an artificial
dignity, accorded specially to work of the historian, bound him by its
conventions to an artificial style. He used, as Johnson said of Dr.
Robertson, "too big words and too many of them." But that was said by
Johnson in his latter days, with admission of like fault in the
convention to which he had once conformed: "If Robertson's style is
bad, that is to say, too big words and too many of them, I am afraid he
caught it of me." Lucian would have dealt as mercilessly with that later
style as Archibald Campbell, ship's purser and son of an Edinburgh
Professor, who used the form of one of Lucian's dialogues,
"Lexiphanes," for an assault of ridicule upon pretentious

sentence-making, and helped a little to get rid of it. Lucian laughed in
his day at small imitators of the manner of Thucydides, as he would
laugh now at the small imitators of the manner of Macaulay. He bade
the historian first get sure facts, then tell them in due order, simply and
without exaggeration or toil after fine writing; though he should aim
not the less at an enduring grace given by Nature to the Art that does
not stray from her, and simply speaks the highest truth it knows.
The endeavour of small Greek historians to add interest to their work
by magnifying the exploits of their countrymen, and piling wonder
upon wonder, Lucian first condemned in his "Instructions for Writing
History," and then caricatured in his "True History," wherein is
contained the account of a trip to the moon, a piece which must have
been enjoyed by Rabelais, which suggested to Cyrano de Bergerac his
Voyages to the Moon and to the Sun, and insensibly contributed,
perhaps, directly or through Bergerac, to the conception of "Gulliver's
Travels." I have added the Icaro- Menippus, because that Dialogue
describes another trip to the moon, though its satire is more especially
directed against the philosophers.
Menippus was born at Gadara in Coele-Syria, and from a slave he grew
to be a Cynic philosopher, chiefly occupied with scornful jests on his
neighbours, and a money-lender, who made large gains and killed
himself when he was cheated of them all. He is said to have written
thirteen pieces which are lost, but he has left his name in literature,
preserved by important pieces that have taken the name of "Menippean
Satire."
Lucian married in middle life, and had a son. He was about fifty years
old when he went to Paphlagonia, and visited a false oracle to detect
the tricks of an Alexander who made profit out of it, and who professed
to have a daughter by the Moon. When the impostor offered Lucian his
hand to kiss, Lucian bit his thumb; he also intervened to the destruction
of a profitable marriage for the daughter of the Moon. Alexander lent