a worm that gnaws on the dull scalp of voluminous Holinshed, but at
every meal devoured more chronicle than his tribe amounts to. A marginal
note of W. P. would serve for a winding-sheet for that man's works, like
thick-skinned fruits are all rind, fit for nothing but the author's
fate, to be pared in a pillory.

The cook who served up the dwarf in a pie (to continue the frolic) might
have lapped up such an historian as this in the bill of fare. He is the
first tincture and rudiment of a writer, dipped as yet in the
preparative blue, like an almanac well-willer. He is the cadet of a
pamphleteer, the pedee of a romancer; he is the embryo of a history
slinked before maturity. How should he record the issues of time who is
himself an abortive? I will not say but that he may pass for an
historian in Garbier's academy; he is much of the size of those
knotgrass professors. What a pitiful seminary was there projected; yet
suitable enough to the present universities, those dry nurses which the
providence of the age has so fully reformed that they are turned
reformadoes. But that's no matter, the meaner the better. It is a maxim
observable in these days, that the only way to win the game is to play
petty Johns. Of this number is the esquire of the quill, for he hath the
grudging of history and some yawnings accordingly. Writing is a disease
in him and holds like a quotidian, so 'tis his infirmity that makes him
an author, as Mahomet was beholding to the falling sickness to vouch him
a prophet. That nice artificer who filed a chain so thin and light that
a flea could trail it (as if he had worked shorthand, and taught his
tools to cypher), did but contrive an emblem for this skipjack and his
slight productions.

Methinks the Turk should licence diurnals because he prohibits learning
and books. A library of diurnals is a wardrobe of frippery; 'tis a just
idea of a Limbo of the infants. I saw one once that could write with his
toes, by the same token I could have wished he had worn his copies for
socks; 'tis he without doubt from whom the diurnals derive their
pedigree, and they have a birthright accordingly, being shuffled out at
the bed's feet of history. To what infinite numbers an historian would
multiply should he crumble into elves of this profession? To supply this
smallness they are fain to join forces, so they are not singly but as
the custom is in a croaking committee. They tug at the pen like slaves
at the oar, a whole