ower, nor the
rising sun; nor the Anno Domini of your new sovereign's coronation.
This must needs be a grateful undertaking to your whole party;
especially to those who have not been so happy as to purchase the
original. I hear the graver has made a good market of it: all his Kings
are bought up already; or the value of the remainder so enhanced, that
many a poor Polander, who would be glad to worship the image, is not
able to go to the cost of him; but must be content to see him here. I
must confess, I am no great artist; but sign-post-painting will serve
the turn to remember a friend by, especially when better is not to be
had. Yet, for your comfort, the lineaments are true: and though he sat
not five times to me, as he did to B. yet I have consulted history; as
the Italian painters do, when they would draw a Nero or a Caligula;
though they have not seen the man, they can help their imagination by a
statue of him, and find out the colouring from Suetonius and Tacitus.
Truth is, you might have spared one side of your medal: the head would
be seen to more advantage, if it were placed on a spike of the tower; a
little nearer to the sun; which would then break out to better purpose.
You tell us, in your preface to the _No-Protestant Plot_, that you
shall be forced hereafter to leave off your modesty. I suppose you mean
that little, which is left you: for it was worn to rags when you put
out this medal. Never was there practised such a piece of notorious
impudence in the face of an established Government. I believe, when he
is dead, you will wear him in thumb-rings, as the Turks did Scanderbeg;
as if there were virtue in his bones to preserve you against monarchy.
Yet all this while, you pretend not only zeal for the public good, but
a due veneration for the person of the king. But all men, who can see
an inch before them, may easily detect those gross fallacies. That it
is necessary for men in your circumstances to pretend both, is granted
you; for without them there could be no ground to raise a faction. But
I would ask you one civil question: What right has any man among you,
or any association of men (to come nearer to you) who, out of
Parliament cannot be consider'd in a public capacity, to meet, as you
daily do, in factious clubs, to vilify the Government in your
discourses, and to libel it in all your writings? Who made you judges
in Israel? Or how is it consistent with your zeal for the public
welfare, to promote se