ause, when your honours and reverences would know whether I
writ clean and fit to be read, you will be able to judge full as well by
looking into my Laundress's bill, as my book: there is one single month
in which I can make it appear, that I dirtied one and thirty shirts with
clean writing; and after all, was more abus'd, cursed, criticis'd, and
confounded, and had more mystic heads shaken at me, for what I had
wrote in that one month, than in all the other months of that year put
together.

--But their honours and reverences had not seen my bills.

Chapter 4.LXXIII.

As I never had any intention of beginning the Digression, I am making
all this preparation for, till I come to the 74th chapter--I have this
chapter to put to whatever use I think proper--I have twenty this moment
ready for it--I could write my chapter of Button-holes in it--

Or my chapter of Pishes, which should follow them--

Or my chapter of Knots, in case their reverences have done with
them--they might lead me into mischief: the safest way is to follow
the track of the learned, and raise objections against what I have been
writing, tho' I declare before-hand, I know no more than my heels how to
answer them.

And first, it may be said, there is a pelting kind of thersitical
satire, as black as the very ink 'tis wrote with--(and by the bye,
whoever says so, is indebted to the muster-master general of the Grecian
army, for suffering the name of so ugly and foul-mouth'd a man as
Thersites to continue upon his roll--for it has furnish'd him with an
epithet)--in these productions he will urge, all the personal washings
and scrubbings upon earth do a sinking genius no sort of good--but
just the contrary, inasmuch as the dirtier the fellow is, the better
generally he succeeds in it.

To this, I have no other answer--at least ready--but that the Archbishop
of Benevento wrote his nasty Romance of the Galatea, as all the world
knows, in a purple coat, waistcoat, and purple pair of breeches; and
that the penance set him of writing a commentary upon the book of the
Revelations, as severe as it was look'd upon by one part of the world,
was far from being deem'd so, by the other, upon the single account of
that Investment.

Another objection, to all this remedy, is its want of universality;
forasmuch as the shaving part of it, upon which so much stress is
laid, by an unalterable law of nature excludes one half of the species
entirely from its use: al