have been the
heroes of all poets, and have been renowned through all ages, for
destroying monsters, for succouring the distressed, and for putting to
death inhuman arbitrary tyrants. Is this your oracle? If he were to
write the acts and monuments of whig heroes, I find they should be
quite contrary to mine: Destroyers indeed,--but of a lawful
government; murderers,--but of their fellow-subjects; lovers, as
Hercules was of Hylas; with a journey at last to hell, like that of
Theseus.

But mark the wise consequences of our author. "I have not," he says,
"so much art left me to make any thing agreeable, or verisimilar,
wherewith to amuse or deceive the people." And yet, in the very next
paragraph, "my province is to corrupt the manners of the nation, and
lay waste their morals, and my endeavours are more happily applied, to
extinguish the little remainders of the virtue of the age." Now, I am
to perform all this, it seems, without making any thing verisimilar or
agreeable! Why, Pharaoh never set the Israelites such a task, to build
pyramids without brick or straw. If the fool knows it not,
verisimilitude and agreeableness are the very tools to do it; but I am
willing to disclaim them both, rather than to use them to so ill
purpose as he has done.

Yet even this their celebrated writer knows no more of stile and
English than the Northern dictator; as if dulness and clumsiness were
fatal to the name of _Tom_. It is true, he is a fool in three
languages more than the poet; for, they say, "he understands Latin,
Greek, and Hebrew," from all which, to my certain knowledge, I acquit
the other. Og may write against the king, if he pleases, so long as he
drinks for him, and his writings will never do the government so much
harm, as his drinking does it good; for true subjects will not be much
perverted by his libels; but the wine-duties rise considerably by his
claret. He has often called me an atheist in print; I would believe
more charitably of him, and that he only goes the broad way, because
the other is too narrow for him. He may see, by this, I do not delight
to meddle with his course of life, and his immoralities, though I have
a long bead-roll of them. I have hitherto contented myself with the
ridiculous part of him, which is enough, in all conscience, to employ
one man; even without the story of his late fall at the Old Devil,
where he broke no ribs, because the hardness of the stairs could reach
no bones; and, for my p