works of nature; whether in proper and
emphatic terms thou didst paint the blazing comet's fiery tail, the
stupendous force of dreadful thunder and earthquakes, and the
unrelenting inundations. Sometimes, with Machiavelian sagacity, thou
unravelledst intrigues of state, and the traitorous conspiracies of
rebels, giving wise counsel to monarchs. How didst thou move our terror
and our pity with thy passionate scenes between Jack Catch and the
heroes of the Old Bailey? How didst thou describe their intrepid march
up Holborn Hill? Nor didst thou shine less in thy theological capacity,
when thou gavest ghostly counsels to dying felons, and didst record the
guilty pangs of Sabbath-breakers. How will the noble arts of John
Overton's[170] painting and sculpture now languish? where rich
invention, proper expression, correct design, divine attitudes, and
artful contrast, heightened with the beauties of clar. obscur.,
embellished thy celebrated pieces, to the delight and astonishment of
the judicious multitude! Adieu, persuasive eloquence! the quaint
metaphor, the poignant irony, the proper epithet, and the lively
simile, are fled for ever! Instead of these, we shall have, I know not
what! The illiterate will tell the rest with pleasure.

I hope the reader will excuse this digression, due by way of condolence
to my worthy brethren of Grub Street, for the approaching barbarity
that is likely to overspread all its regions by this oppressive and
exorbitant tax. It has been my good fortune to receive my education
there; and so long as I preserved some figure and rank amongst the
learned of that society, I scorned to take my degree either at Utrecht
or Leyden, though I was offered it gratis by the professors in those
universities.

And now that posterity may not be ignorant in what age so excellent a
history was written (which would otherwise, no doubt, be the subject
of its inquiries), I think it proper to inform the learned of future
times, that it was compiled when Louis XIV. was King of France, and
Philip, his grandson, of Spain; when England and Holland, in
conjunction with the Emperor and the Allies, entered into a war against
these two princes, which lasted ten years under the management of the
Duke of Marlborough, and was put to a conclusion by the Treaty of
Utrecht, under the ministry of the Earl of Oxford, in the year 1713.

Many at that time did imagine the history of John Bull, and the
personages mentioned in it, to be a