Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

80
RENBECUt.A.
Tamaamaali liis island, and we send gunpowder and mis-
sionaries to islands, and try to set islands by the ears, and
write pamphlets on the Falkland islands, and find room
for dependents in the island of Mauritius and in Prince
of Wales's island, and improve the condition of islands by
planting in them guns, turnips, dissensions, rum, and the
small pox.
Furthermore, we colonize islands with the rejecta-
menta of the halter and the law, send our younger sons to
die in islands, maroon mutinous buccanneers on islands,
as Vulcan of yore was transmitted to the island of
Lemnos and Napoleon to the island of Elba, and despatch
fleets to discover islands of ice in the Polar basin. If St.
Columba established himself in an island, so did Robinson
Crusoe and the Monks of Patmos ;
and Venus was wor-
shipped in the island of Cyprus, as the Colossus of
Rhodes was built on an island. As the Highland Chief-
tains erected their castles on islands, so did the Knights of
Malta; and the heart of Ulysses, as all schoolboys know,
was divided between the rival islands of Penelope and
Calypso. Cos lettuce comes from an island, and so does
madeira; to say nothing of the island of Zante, without
which we should have no minced pies. If the original
Paradise was not an island, there was one in the islands of
Mirza, and so there is in the Fortunate islands, if we
could find them out: unless indeed they are the Loo
Choo islands. Then there Avas the old island of Atalantis,
which seems to have met with the fate of Sabrina, and
my Lord Bacon's New Atalantis, which I hope never to
see as long as I live. As to the Pelew islands, and Sir
Thomas More's island, and the islands of George Psal-
manazar and of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, I must pass
them by, lest you should learn more geography than you
can at present digest ;
particularly as I have two or three