Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 3.djvu/134

126 or remorse in either, although some very good opportunities have offered, if they had thought fit to accept them; so that, with your permission, I would rather engage to continue this work until they be in their graves too: which I am sure will happen much sooner than the other.

You desire I would collect some of those indignities offered last year to her majesty. I am ready to oblige you; and have got a pretty tolerable collection by me, which I am in doubt whether to publish by itself in a large volume in folio, or scatter them here and there occasionally in my papers: although indeed I am sometimes thinking to stifle them altogether; because such a history will be apt to give foreigners a monstrous opinion of our country. But since it is your absolute opinion, that the world should be informed; I will, with the first occasion, pick out a few choice instances, and let them take their chance in the ensuing papers. I have likewise in my cabinet certain quires of paper, filled with facts of corruption, mismanagement, cowardice, treachery, avarice, ambition, and the like; with an alphabetical table, to save trouble. And perhaps you will not wonder at the care I take to be so well provided, when you consider the vast expense I am at. I feed weekly two or three wit-starved writers, who have no visible support; beside several other others, who live upon my offals. In short, I am like a nurse who suckles twins at one time; and has besides one or two whelps constantly to draw her breasts.

I must needs confess (and it is with grief I speak it) that I have been the innocent cause of a great circulation of dulness: at the same time, I have often wondered how it has come to pass, that these industrious