fists, under pretence of embracing the king's chaplain, who brought the present, but indeed to embrace the present itself, and by accepting it to exhaust almost all the king's treasury.

But now the man comes himself, the door creaks; the actor comes upon the stage.

In silence now, and with attention wait,

That ye may learn what th' Eunuch has to prate.

Terent.

For whatever the matter is with him, he blusters more than ordinary. "A horrible message had lately struck our ears, but our minds more, with a heinous wound concerning a parricide committed in England in the person of a king, by`a wicked conspiracy of sacrilegious men." Indeed that horrible message must either have had a much longer sword than that which Peter drew, or those ears must have been of a wonderful length, that it could wound at such a distance; for it could not so much as in the least offend any ears but those of an ass. For what harm is it to you, that are foreigners are any of you hurt by it, if we amongst ourselves put our own enemies, our own traitors to death, be they commoners, noblemen, or kings? Do you, Salmaşius, let alone what does not concern you: for I have a horrible message to bring of you too; which I am mistaken if it strike not a more heinous wound into the ears of all grammarians and critics, provided they have any learning and delicacy in them, to wit, your crowding so many barbarous expressions together in one period in the person of (Aristarchus) a grammarian; and that so great a critic as you, hired at the king's charge to write a defence of the king his father, should not only set so fulsome a preface before it, much like those lamentable

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ditties that used to be sung at funerals, and which can move compassion in none but a coxcomb; but in the very first sentence should provoke your readers to laughter with so many barbarisms all at once. "Persona regis," you cry. Where do you find any such Latin ? or are you telling us some tale or other of a Perkin Warbec, who taking upon him the person of a king, has, forsooth, committed some horrible parricide in England? which expression, though dropping carelessly from your pen, has more truth in it than you are aware of. For a tyrant is but like a king upon a stage, a man in a vizor, and acting the part of a king in a play; he is not really a king. But as for these gallicisms, that are so frequent in your book, I won't lash you for them myself, for I am not at leisure; but shall deliver you over to your fellow grammarians, to be laughed to scorn and whipped by them. What follows is much more heinous, than what was decreed by our supreme magistracy to be done to the king, should be said by you to have been done "by a wicked conspiracy of sacrilegious persons." Have you the impudence, you rogue, to talk at this rate of the acts and decrees of the chief magistrates of a nation, that lately was a most potent kingdom, and is now a more potent commonwealth? Whose proceedings no king ever took upon him by word of mouth, or otherwise, to vilify and set at nought. The illustrious states of Holland, therefore, the genuine offspring of those deliverers of their country, have deservedly by their edict condemned to utter darkness this defence of tyrants, so pernicious to the liberty of all nations; the author of which every free state ought to forbid their country, or to banish out of it; and that state particularly that feeds with a stipend so ungrateful and so savage an enemy to their commonwealth, whose very fundamentals, and the causes of

their becoming a free state, this fellow endeavours to undermine as well as ours, and at one and the same time to subvert both; loading with calumnies the most worthy assertors of liberty there, under our names. Consider with yourselves, ye most illustrious states of the United Netherlands, who it was that put this assertor of kingly power upon setting pen to paper? who it was, that but lately began to play Rex in your country?what counsels were taken, what endeavours used, and what disturbances ensued thereupon in Holland? and to what pass things might have been brought by this time? How slavery and a new master were ready prepared for you; and how near expiring that liberty of yours, asserted and vindicated by so many years war and toil, would have been ere now, if it had not taken breath again by the timely death of a certain rash young gentleman. But our author begins to strut again, and to feign wonderful tragedies; "whomsoever this dreadful news reached (to wit, the news of Salmasius's parricidial barbarisms) all of a sudden, as if they had been struck with lightning, their hair stood on end, and their tongues clove to the roof of their mouth." Which let natural philosophers take notice of (for this secret in nature was never discovered before) that lightning makes men's hair stand on end. But who knows not that little effeminate minds are apt to be amazed at the news of any extraordinary great action; and that then they show themselves to be, what they really were before, no better than so many stocks?" Some could not refrain from tears;" some little women at court, I suppose, or if there be any more effeminate than they, of whose number Salmasius himself being one, is by a new metamorphosis become a fountain near akin to his name (Salmacis) and with his counterfeit flood of tears prepared over night, endeavours

to emasculate generous minds: I advise therefore, and

wish them to have a care;

Infamis ne quem malè fortibus undis.

Salmacis enervet.

Ne, si vir cum venerit, exeat indè
Semivir, & tactis subitò mollescat in undis.

Abstain, as manhood you esteem,
From Salmacis' pernicious stream:
If but one moment there you stay,
Too dear you'll for your bathing pay.—
Depart nor man nor woman, but a sight
Disgracing both, a loath'd hermaphrodite.

"They that had more courage" (which yet he expresses in miserable bald Latin, as if he could not so much as speak of men of courage and magnanimity in proper words) were set on fire with indignation to that degree, that they could hardly contain themselves." Those furious Hectors we value not of a rush. We have been accustomed to rout such bullies in the field with a true sober courage; a courage becoming men that can contain themselves, and are in their right wits. "There were none that did not curse the authors of so horrible a villany." But yet, you say, their tongues clove to the roof of their mouths; and if you mean this of our fugitives only, I wish they had clove there to this day; for we know very well, that there is nothing more common with them, than to have their mouths full of curses and imprecations, which indeed all good men abominate, but withal despise. As for others, it is hardly credible, that when they heard the news of our having inflicted a capital punishment upon the king, there should any be found, especially in a free state, so naturally adapted to slavery as either to speak ill of us, or so much as to censure

what we had done. Nay, it is highly probable, that all good men applauded us, and gave God thanks for so illustrious, so exalted a piece of justice; and for a caution so very useful to other princes. In the mean time, as for those fierce, those steel-hearted men, that, you say, take on for, and bewail so pitifully, the lamentable and wonderful death I know not who; them, I say, together with their tinkling advocate, the dullest that ever appeared since the name of a king was born and known in the world, we shall even let whine on, till they cry their eyes out. But in the mean time, what schoolboy, what little insignificant monk could not have made a more elegant speech for the king, and in better Latin, than this royal advocate has done? But it would be folly in me to make such particular animadversions upon his childishness and frenzies throughout his book, as I do here upon a few in the beginning of it; which yet 1 would be willing enough to do (for we hear that he is swelled with pride and conceit to the utmost degree imaginable) if the undigested and immethodical bulk of his book did not protect him, He was resolved to take a course like the soldier in Terence, to save his bacon; and it was very cunning in him, to stuff his book with so much puerility, and so many silly whimsies, that it might nauseate the smartest man in the world to death to take notice of them all. Only I thought it might not be amiss to give a specimen of him in the preface; and to let the serious reader have a taste of him at first, that he might guess by the first dish that is served up, how noble an entertainment the rest are like to make; and that he may imagine with himself what an infinite number of fooleries and impertinencies must needs be heaped up together in the body of the book, when they stand so thick in the very entrance into it, where, of all