Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 16.djvu/303

Rh say to a prime minister, "Sir, you have sufficiently provided that Dunkirk should be absolutely demolished and never repaired; you took the best advantages of a long and general peace to discharge the immense debts of the nation; you did wonders with the fleet; you made the Spaniards submit to our quiet possession of Gibraltar and Portmahon; you never enriched yourself and family at the expense of the publick." —— Such is the style of your supposed letter; which, however, if I am well informed, by no means comes up to the refinements of a fishwife at Billingsgate. "You never had a bastard by Tom the waterman; you never stole a silver tankard; you were never whipped at the cart's tail."

In the title of your letter, it is said to be "occasioned by the late invectives on the King, her Majesty, and all the Royal Family:" and the whole contents of the paper (stripped from your eloquence) goes on upon a supposition affectedly serious, that their majesties, and the whole royal family, have been lately bitterly and publickly inveighed against, in the most enormous and treasonable manner. Now, being a man, as you well know, altogether out of business, I do sometimes lose an hour in reading a few of those controversial papers upon politicks, which have succeeded for some years past to the polemical tracts between whig and tory: and in this kind of reading (if it may deserve to be so called) although I have been often but little edified, or entertained, yet has it given me occasion to make some observations. First, I have observed, that however men may sincerely agree in all the branches of the low church principle, in a tenderness for dissenters of every kind, in a perfect abhorrence of Rh