A Tale Of A Tub

Authors wouldn’t be remembered if their work wasn’t “highly serviceable to the general good of mankind” (89). Indeed, the narrator has found that the public good works as both “instruction and diversion” (90). There is a better advantage in diversion because humans spend a lot of time being lazy, whereas there seems to be little left in the universe to teach. In fact, modern thinkers and writers have made readers forget the ancients. The narrator wonders why we cannot put what is known into one “small portable volume of all things” (91) so that it is accessible to all. However, he notes that one author did attempt this. A philosopher from an imaginary island called O-Brazile suggested a nostrum that would put into words a theory to fix social ills: “It [would] dilate itself about the brain (where there is any)” (91) and allow the taker to think of abstracts and collections, and to write them down. 

The narrator moves on to discuss Homer, who he finds subpar. Homer’s writing did not have a useful structure, he states. He stresses the fact that Homer had zero knowledge of England’s laws or of the doctrine encompassing the Church of England. Even his friend, William Wotton, a Bachelor of Divinity who was also a classicist and linguist, has highlighted the shortcomings of the ancients in his book—a tome that shows his

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