of your papers, you declare an intention of turning
them, during the dead season of the year, into accounts of domestic and
foreign intelligence; yet I think we, your correspondents, should not
understand your meaning so literally, as if you intended to reject
inserting any other paper, which might probably be useful for the
public. Neither, indeed, am I fully convinced that this new course you
resolve to take will render you more secure than your former laudable
practice, of inserting such speculations as were sent you by several
well-wishers to the good of the kingdom; however grating such notices
might be to some, who wanted neither power nor inclination to resent
them at your cost. For, since there is a direct law against spreading
false news, if you should venture to tell us in one of the Craftsmen
that the Dey of Algiers had got the toothache, or the King of Bantam had
taken a purge, and the facts should be contradicted in succeeding
packets; I do not see what plea you could offer to avoid the utmost
penalty of the law, because you are not supposed to be very gracious
among those who are most able to hurt you.

Besides, as I take your intentions to be sincerely meant for the public
service, so your original method of entertaining and instructing us will
be more general and more useful in this season of the year, when people
are retired to amusements more cool, more innocent, and much more
reasonable than those they have left; when their passions are subsided
or suspended; when they have no occasions of inflaming themselves, or
each other; where they will have opportunities of hearing common sense,
every day in the week, from their tenants or neighbouring farmers, and
thereby be qualified, in hours of rain or leisure, to read and consider
the advice or information you shall send them.

Another weighty reason why you should not alter your manner of writing,
by dwindling to a newsmonger, is because there is no suspension of arms
agreed on between you and your adversaries, who fight with a sort of
weapons which have two wonderful qualities, that they are never to be
worn out, and are best wielded by the weakest hands, and which the
poverty of our language forceth me to call by the trite appellations of
scurrility, slander, and Billingsgate. I am far from thinking that these
gentlemen, or rather their employers, (for the operators themselves are
too obscure to be guessed at) should be answered after their own way,
alt