their graves too, which I am sure
will happen much sooner than the other.

You desire I would collect "some of those indignities offered last year
to her M[ajest]y." I am ready to oblige you; and have got a pretty
tolerable collection by me, which I am in doubt whether to publish by
itself in a large volume in folio, or scatter them here and there
occasionally in my papers. Though indeed I am sometimes thinking to
stifle them altogether; because such a history will be apt to give
foreigners a monstrous opinion of our country. But since it is your
absolute opinion, the world should be informed; I will with the first
occasion pick out a few choice instances, and let them take their chance
in the ensuing papers. I have likewise in my cabinet certain quires of
paper filled with facts of corruption, mismanagement, cowardice,
treachery, avarice, ambition, and the like, with an alphabetical table,
to save trouble. And perhaps you will not wonder at the care I take to be
so well provided, when you consider the vast expense I am at: I feed
weekly two or three wit-starved writers, who have no other visible
support; besides several others that live upon my offals. In short, I am
like a nurse who suckles twins at one time, and has likewise one or two
whelps constantly to draw her breasts.

I must needs confess, (and it is with grief I speak it) that I have been
the innocent cause of a great circulation of dullness: at the same time,
I have often wondered how it has come to pass, that these industrious
people, after poring so constantly upon the "Examiner,"[5] a paper writ
with plain sense, and in a tolerable style, have made so little
improvement. I am sure it would have fallen out quite otherwise with me;
for, by what I have seen of their performances (and I am credibly
informed they are all of a piece) if I had perused them till now, I
should have been fit for little but to make an advocate in the same
cause.

You, Sir, perhaps will wonder, as most others do, what end these angry
folks propose, in writing perpetually against the "Examiner": it is not
to beget a better opinion of the late ministry, or with any hope to
convince the world that I am in the wrong in any one fact I relate; they
know all that to be lost labour; and yet their design is important
enough: they would fain provoke me by all sort of methods, within the
length of their capacity, to answer their papers; which would render mine
wholly useless to the public;