Off Cape Finisterre, a British sloop mistakes a French warship for an easy prize—until the “merchantman” opens its gunports and fires a thirty-two-pounder. The captain’s answer is not a battle cry, but a surprisingly tender excuse to run. W. S. Gilbert’s late-nineteenth-century verses turn sailors, patriots, self-appointed philanthropists and other familiar types into targets of nimble, musical satire. A boastful Englishman celebrates the accidents of his birth; a man who claims to love humanity cannot understand why everyone finds him disagreeable. Their jokes land lightly, but leave social vanity and self-deception rather less comfortable than they began. From a naval retreat offered as kindness to a gentleman’s baffled defense of his own manners, these songs keep asking who is really being made ridiculous. And when the speakers insist they are entirely in the right, should we believe them? With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world. Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.
