return you thanks as a deliverer of precious and useful truths.
Nay, further, it is but to venture your lungs, and you may preach in
Covent Garden against foppery and fornication, and something else;
against pride, and dissimulation, and bribery at Whitehall. You may
expose rapine and injustice in the Inns-of-Court chapel, and in a
City pulpit be as fierce as you please against avarice, hypocrisy,
and extortion. It is but a ball bandied to and fro, and every man
carries a racket about him to strike it from himself among the rest
of the company. But, on the other side, whoever should mistake the
nature of things so far as to drop but a single hint in public how
such a one starved half the fleet, and half poisoned the rest; how
such a one, from a true principle of love and honour, pays no debts
but for wenches and play; how such a one runs out of his estate; how
Paris, bribed by Juno and Venus, loath to offend either party, slept
out the whole cause on the bench; or how such an orator makes long
speeches in the Senate, with much thought, little sense, and to no
purpose;--whoever, I say, should venture to be thus particular, must
expect to be imprisoned for scandalum magnatum, to have challenges
sent him, to be sued for defamation, and to be brought before the
bar of the House.

But I forget that I am expatiating on a subject wherein I have no
concern, having neither a talent nor an inclination for satire. On
the other side, I am so entirely satisfied with the whole present
procedure of human things, that I have been for some years preparing
material towards "A Panegyric upon the World;" to which I intended
to add a second part, entitled "A Modest Defence of the Proceedings
of the Rabble in all Ages." Both these I had thoughts to publish by
way of appendix to the following treatise; but finding my common-
place book fill much slower than I had reason to expect, I have