Page:Colasterion - Milton (1645).djvu/30

 to none, and brings inconvenience to numbers, who lie under intolerable greevances without their own default, through the wickednes or folly of another; and all this iniquity the Law remedies not, but in a manner maintains? His other cases are directly to the same purpos, and might have bin spar'd, but that hee is a tradsman of the Law, and must be born with at his first setting up, to lay forth his best ware, which is only gibbrish.

I have now don that, which for many causes I might have thought, could not likely have bin my fortune, to bee put to this under-work of scowring and unrubbishing the low and sordid ignorance of such a presumptuous lozel. Yet Hercules had the labour once impos'd upon him to carry dung out of the Augean stable. At any hand I would bee ridd of him: for I had rather, since the life of man is likn'd to a Scene, that all my entrances and exits might mixe with such persons only, whose worth erects them and their actions to a grave and tragic deportment, and not to have to doe with Clowns and Vices. But if a man cannot peaceably walk into the world, but must bee infested, somtimes at his face with dorrs and horsflies, somtimes beneath with bauling whippets and shin-barkers, and these to bee set on by plot and consultation with a Junto of Clergy men and Licencers, commended also and rejoyc't in by those whose partiality cannot yet forgoe old papisticall principles, have I not cause to bee in such a manner defensive, as may procure mee freedom to pass more unmolested heerafter by those incumbrances, not so much regarded for themselvs, as for those who incite them. And what defence can properly bee us'd in such a despicable encounter as this, but either the flap or the spurn? If they can afford mee none but a ridiculous adversary, the blame belongs not to mee, though the whole Dispute bee strew'd and scatter'd with ridiculous. And if hee have such an ambition to know no better who are his mates, but among these needy thoughts, which though his two faculties of Serving-man and Sollicitor should compound into one mongrel, would bee but thin and meager, if in this penury of Soul hee can bee possible to have the lustiness to think of fame, let him but send mee how hee calls himself, and I may chance not fail to endorse him on the backside of posterity, not a golden, but a brazen Asse. Since my fate extorts from mee a talent of sport, which I had thought to hide in a napkin, hee shall bee my Batrachomuomachia, my Bavius, my landrino