Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 5.djvu/106

98 cushion, to read what is hardly legible: which, beside the untoward manner, hinders them from making the best advantage of their voice: others again have a trick of popping up and down every moment from their paper, to the audience, like an idle schoolboy on a repetition day.

Let me intreat you therefore to add one half crown a year to the article of paper; to transcribe your sermons in as large and plain a manner as you can; and either make no interlineations, or change the whole leaf; for we, your hearers, would rather you should be less correct, than perpetually stammering, which I take to be one of the worst solecisms in rhetorick. And lastly, read your sermon once or twice a day, for a few days before you preach it: to which you will probably answer some years hence, "that it was but just finished, when the last bell rang to church:" and I shall readily believe, but not excuse you.

I cannot forbear warning you, in the most earnest manner, against endeavouring at wit in your sermons, because, by the strictest computation, it is very near a million to one that you have none; and because too many of your calling have consequently made themselves everlastingly ridiculous by attempting it. I remember several young men in this town, who could never leave the pulpit under half a dozen conceits; and this faculty adhered to those gentlemen a longer or shorter time, exactly in proportion to their several degrees of dulness; accordingly, I am told that some of them retain it to this day. I heartily wish the brood were at an end.

Before you enter into the common unsufferable cant,