rther, I may safely urge, that all this is no more than the
same with what is done by several seemingly great and wise men, who with
a new-fashioned modesty employ some paltry orator or scribbling poet,
whom they bribe to flatter them with some high-flown character, that
shall consist of mere lies and shams; and yet the persons thus extolled
shall bristle up, and, peacock-like, bespread their plumes, while the
impudent parasite magnifies the poor wretch to the skies, and proposes
him as a complete pattern of all virtues, from each of which he is yet
as far distant as heaven itself from hell: what is all this in the mean
while, but the tricking up a daw in stolen feathers; a labouring to
change the black-a-moor's hue, and the drawing on a pigmy's frock over
the shoulders of a giant.

Lastly, I verify the old observation, that allows him a right of
praising himself, who has nobody else to do it for him: for really, I
cannot but admire at that ingratitude, shall I term it, or blockishness
of mankind, who when they all willingly pay to me their utmost
devoir, and freely acknowledge their respective obligations; that
notwithstanding this, there should have been none so grateful or
complaisant as to have bestowed on me a commendatory oration, especially
when there have not been wanting such as at a great expense of sweat,
and loss of sleep, have in elaborate speeches, given high encomiums to
tyrants, agues, flies, baldness, and such like trumperies.

I shall entertain you with a hasty and unpremeditated, but so much the
more natural discourse. My venting it _ex tempore_, I would not have
you think proceeds from any principles of vain glory by which ordinary
orators square their attempts, who (as it is easy to observe) when they
are delivered of a speech that has been thirty years a conceiving, nay,
perhaps at last, none of their own, yet they will swear they wrote it in
a great hurry, and upon very short warning: whereas the reason of my
not being provided beforehand is only because it was always my humour
constantly to speak that which lies uppermost. Next, let no one be
so fond as to imagine, that I should so far stint my invention to
the method of other pleaders, as first to define, and then divide
my subject, i.e., myself. For it is equally hazardous to attempt the
crowding her within the narrow limits of a definition, whose nature
is of so diffusive an extent, or to mangle and disjoin that, to the
adoration whereof all