Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 5.djvu/52

44 But the greatest grievance is, a paltry quack, that takes up my calling just under my nose, and in his printed directions with N. B. says, he lives in the house of the late ingenious Mr. John Partridge, an eminent practitioner in leather, physick, and astrology.

But to show how far the wicked spirit of envy, malice and resentment can hurry some men, my nameless old persecutor had provided me a monument at the stonecutter's, and would have erected it in the parish church; and this piece of notorious and expensive villany had actually succeeded, if I had not used my utmost interest with the vestry, where it was carried at last but by two voices, that I am alive. That stratagem failing, out comes a long sable elegy, bedecked with hourglasses, mattocks, sculls, spades, and skeletons, with an epitaph as confidently written to abuse me and my profession, as if I had been under ground these twenty years.

And after such barbarous treatment as this, can the world blame me, when I ask, what is become of the freedom of an Englishman? and where is the liberty and property, that my old glorious friend came over to assert? we have drove popery out of the nation, and sent slavery to foreign climes. The arts only remain in bondage, when a man of science and character shall be openly insulted, in the midst of the many useful services he is daily paying the publick. Was it ever heard, even in Turkey or Algiers, that a state astrologer was bantered out of his life by an ignorant impostor, or bawled out of the world by a pack of villanous, deep-mouthed hawkers? though I print almanacks, and