Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 3.djvu/206

198 has not that been most scandalously clipped and mangled, and often counterfeited too?

It is another grievous complaint of the whigs, that their late friends, and the whole party, are treated with abundance of severity in print, and in particular by the Examiner. They think it hard, that when they are wholly deprived of power, hated by the people, and out of all hope of establishing themselves, their infirmities should be so often displayed, in order to render them yet more odious to mankind. This is what they employ their writers to set forth in their papers of the week; and it is humourous enough to observe one page taken up in railing at the Examiner, for his invectives against a discarded ministry; and the other side filled with the falsest and vilest abuses, against those who are now in the highest power and credit with their sovereign, and whose least breath would scatter them in silence and obscurity. However, although I have indeed often wondered to see so much licentiousness taken and connived at, and am sure it would not be suffered in any other country of Christendom; yet I never once invoked the assistance of the gaol or pillory, which, upon the least provocation, was the usual style during their tyranny. There has not passed a week these twenty years, without some malicious paper scattered in every coffeehouse by the emissaries of that party, whether it were down or up. I believe they will not pretend to object the same thing to us: nor do I remember any constant weekly paper with reflections on the late ministry or junto. They have many weak defenceless parts; they have not been used to a regular tack: