Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 12.djvu/423

Rh letter which bears my name; I can only say, that the apprehensions one may be apt to have of a friend's doing a foolish thing, is an effect of kindness: and God knows who is free from playing the fool some time or other. But in such a degree as to write to the queen, who has used me ill without any cause, and to write in such a manner as the letter you sent me, and in such a style, and to have so much zeal for one almost a stranger, and to make such a description of a woman as to prefer her before all mankind; and to instance it as one of the greatest grievances of Ireland, that her majesty has not encouraged Mrs. Barber, a woollendraper's wife declined in the world, because she has a knack at versifying; was to suppose, or fear, a folly so transcendent, that no man could be guilty of, who was not fit for Bedlam. You know the letter you sent enclosed is not my hand; and why I should disguise, and yet sign my name, should seem unaccountable: especially when I am taught, and have reason to believe, that I am under the queen's displeasure on many accounts, and one very late, for having fixed up a stone over the burying place of the duke of Schomberg, in my cathedral: which, however, I was assured by a worthy person, who solicited that affair last summer with some relations of the duke, "That her majesty, on hearing the matter, said they ought to erect a monument." Yet I am told assuredly, that the king not long ago, on the representation and complaint of the Prussian envoy (with a hard name) who has married a granddaughter of the duke, said publickly in the drawingroom, "That I had put up that stone out of malice, to raise a quarrel between his majesty and the king "of