gh, for it
casts the water of the state ever since it staled blood. It differs from
an Aulicus, as the devil and his exorcist, or as a black witch doth from
a white one, whose office is to unravel her enchantments.

It begins usually with an Ordinance, which is a law still born, dropped
before quickened by the royal assent. 'Tis one of the parliament's
bye-blows, acts only being legitimate, and hath no more sire than a
Spanish jennet that is begotten by the wind.

Thus their militia, like its patron Mars, is the issue only of the
mother, without the concourse of royal Jupiter: yet law it is, if they
vote it, in defiance to their fundamentals; like the old sexton, who
swore his clock went true, whatever the sun said to the contrary.

The next ingredient of a diurnal is plots, horrible plots, which with
wonderful sagacity it hunts dry-Coot, while they are yet in their
causes, before _materia prima_ can put on her smock. How many such fits
of the mother have troubled the kingdom; and for all Sir W.E. [William
Earle] looks like a man-midwife, not yet delivered of so much as a
cushion? But actors must have properties; and since the stages were
voted down the only playhouse is at Westminster.

Suitable to their plots are their informers, skippers, and tailors,
spaniels both for the land and water. Good conscionable intelligence!
For however Pym's bill may inflame the reckoning, the honest vermin have
not so much for lying as the public faith.

Thus a zealous botcher in Moorfields, while he was contriving some
quirpocut of Church-Government, by the help of his outlying ears and the
Otacousticon of the spirit, discovered such a plot, that Selden intends
to combat antiquity, and maintain it was a tailor's goose that preserved
the capital.

I wonder my Lord of Canterbury is not once more all to be traitored, for
dealing with the lions to settle the Commission of Array in the Tower.
It would do well to cramp the articles dormant, besides the opportunity
of reforming these beasts of the prerogative, and changing their
profaner names of Harry and Charles into Nehemiah and Eleazar.

Suppose a corn-cutter being to give little Isaac a cast of his office
should fall to paring his brows (mistaking the one end for the other,
because he branches at both), this would be a plot, and the next diurnal
would furnish you with this scale of votes:--

_Resolved_ upon the question, That this act of the corn-cutter was an
absolute invasion