Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 10.djvu/305

Rh that the dey of Algiers had got the tooth-ach, or the king of Bantam had taken a purge; and the facts should be contradicted in succeeding packets; I do not see what plea you could offer, to avoid the utmost penalty of the law, because you are not supposed to be very gracious among those who are most able to hurt you.

Besides, as I take your intentions to be sincerely meant for the publick service; so your original method of entertaining and instructing us, will be more general, and more useful in this season of the year, when people are retired to amusements more cool, more innocent, and much more reasonable, than those they have left; when their passions are subsided or suspended; when they have no occasions of inflaming themselves, or each other: where they will have opportunity of hearing common sense, every day in the week, from their tenants or neighbouring farmers; and thereby be qualified, in hours of rain or leisure, to read and consider the advice or information you shall send them.

Another weighty reason why you should not alter your manner of writing, by dwindling to a newsmonger, is, because there is no suspension of arms agreed on between you and your adversaries; who fight with a sort of weapons which have two wonderful qualities, that they are never to be worn out, and are best wielded by the weakest hands, and which the poverty of our language forces me to call, by the trite appellations of scurrility, slander, and Billingsgate. I am far from thinking that these gentlemen, or rather their employers, (for the operators themselves are too obscure to be guessed at) should be answered after their own way, although it were possible to drag them out