Gulliver tries to please the court before politics finds him. At the king's levee he watches a razor like a scythe, then picks stumps from the royal lather and makes a tolerable comb. From the queen's combings he weaves cane chairs and a five, foot purse for Glumdalclitch; the queen wants him to sit on a chair made of her hair and he refuses, protesting he would rather die than dishonour what once crowned her. Court concerts deafen him until he shuts his box; to entertain the king he runs sideling along a spinet sixty feet long, banging sixteen keys with mouse, skin drumsticks until he plays a jig to their majesties' satisfaction, the most violent exercise of his life. The king, who delights in understanding, sets Gulliver on a cabinet and asks for an exact account of England's government. Gulliver wishes for Demosthenes or Cicero and delivers the praise he thinks his country deserves: two islands and three kingdoms under one sovereign, fertile soil, the House of Peers bred in arts and arms, holy bishops chosen for sanctity, Commons freely picked for ability and love of country, wise judges, prudent treasury, brave forces by sea and land, sports and pastimes, and a century of history. The conversation runs five audiences of several hours; the king listens, takes notes, and prepares questions. In a sixth audience he sifts every article. How are young nobles trained, and by what merit are new lords created: the prince's humour, money to a court lady, party strength? Are bishops promoted for piety or for servile compliance? Can a stranger with a strong purse buy a seat among the Commons, and do zealous members refund themselves by serving a weak prince and corrupted ministry? Gulliver's own chancery ruin informs the king's questions about delay, expense, lawyers pleading manifestly unjust causes, and precedents cited both ways. Taxes of five or six millions cannot match issues that sometimes double; the kingdom runs out of its estate like a private man. A mercenary standing army in peacetime amazes a king who cannot see whom a free people governed by consent should fear. English history becomes only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, and banishments, the worst effects of avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition. Recapitulating Gulliver's answers, the king strokes him and calls his speech an admirable panegyric that has clearly proved ignorance, idleness, and vice the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator, laws best explained by those who pervert them, and every station filled without the virtues that should procure it. He hopes Gulliver has escaped many vices; from what he has wrung out of him, he cannot but conclude the bulk of English natives the most pernicious race of little odious vermin nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
