e Invectives on the King, her Majesty, and all the Royal Family." By
these initial letters of our names, the world is to understand that you
and I must be meant. Although the letter seems to require an answer, yet
because it appears to be written rather in the style and manner used by
some of your pensioners, than your own, I shall allow you the liberty to
think the same of this answer, and leave the public to determine which
of the two actors can better personate their principals. That frigid and
fustian way of haranguing wherewith your representer begins, continues,
and ends his declamation, I shall leave to the critics in eloquence and
propriety to descant on; because it adds nothing to the weight of your
accusations, nor will my defence be one grain the better by exposing its
puerilities.

I shall therefore only remark upon this particular, that the frauds and
corruptions in most other arts and sciences, as law, physic (I shall
proceed no further) are usually much more plausibly defended than in
that of politics; whether it be, that by a kind of fatality the
vindication of a corrupt minister is always left to the management of
the meanest and most prostitute writers; or whether it be, that the
effects of a wicked or unskilful administration, are more public,
visible, pernicious and universal. Whereas the mistakes in other
sciences are often matters that affect only speculation; or at worst,
the bad consequences fall upon few and private persons. A nation is
quickly sensible of the miseries it feels, and little comforted by
knowing what account it turns to by the wealth, the power, the honours
conferred on those who sit at the helm, or the salaries paid to their
penmen; while the body of the people is sunk into poverty and despair. A
Frenchman in his wooden shoes may, from the vanity of his nation, and
the constitution of that government, conceive some imaginary pleasure in
boasting the grandeur of his monarch, in the midst of his own slavery;
but a free-born Englishman, with all his loyalty, can find little
satisfaction at a minister overgrown in wealth and power from the lowest
degree of want and contempt; when that power or wealth are drawn from
the bowels and blood of the nation, for which every fellow-subject is a
sufferer, except the great man himself, his family, and his pensioners.
I mean such a minister (if there hath ever been such a one) whose whole
management hath been a continued link of ignorance, blunde