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.

* Act restraining the liberty of the press, etc.
** The engraver of the cuts before the Grub Street papers.

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 allegorical, which the author