a scribbler, but it hangs about him like an old wife’s skin when the flesh hath forsaken her, lank and loose.  He defames a good title as well as most of our modern noblemen; those wens of greatness, the body politic’s most peccant humours blistered into lords.  He hath so raw-boned a being that however you render him he rubs it out and makes rags of the expression.  The silly countryman who, seeing an ape in a scarlet coat, blessed his young worship, and gave his landlord joy of the hopes of his house, did not slander his complement with worse application than he that names this shred an historian.  To call him an historian is to knight a mandrake; ’tis to view him through a perspective, and by that gross hyperbole to give the reputation of an engineer to a maker of mousetraps.  Such an historian would hardly pass muster with a Scotch stationer in a sieveful of ballads and godly books.  He would not serve for the breast-plate of a begging Grecian.  The most cramped compendium that the age hath seen since all learning hath been almost torn into ends, outstrips him by the head.  I have heard of puppets that could prattle in a play, but never saw of their writings before.  There goes a report of the Holland women that together with their children they are delivered of a Sooterkin, not unlike to a rat, which some imagine to be the offspring of the stoves.  I know not what Ignis fatuus adulterates the press, but it seems much after that fashion, else how could this vermin think to be a twin to a legitimate writer; when those weekly fragments shall pass for history, let the poor man’s box be entitled the exchequer, and the alms-basket a magazine.  Not a worm that gnaws on the dull scalp of voluminous Holinshed, but at every meal devoured more chronicle than his tribe amounts to.  A marginal note of W. P. would serve for a winding-sheet for that man’s works, like thick-skinned fruits are all rind, fit for nothing but the author’s fate, to be pared in a pillory.

The cook who served up the dwarf in a pie (to continue the frolic) might have lapped up such an historian as this in the bill of fare.  He is the first tincture and rudiment of a writer, dipped as yet in the preparative blue, like an almanac well-willer.  He is the cadet of a pamphleteer, the pedee of a romancer; he is the embryo of a history slinked before maturity.  How should he record the issues of time who is himself an abortive?  I will not say but that he may pass for an historian in Garbier’s academy; he is much of the size of those knotgrass professors.  What a pitiful seminary was there projected; yet suitable enough to the present universities, those dry nurses which the providence of the age has so fully reformed that they are turned reformadoes.  But that’s no matter, the meaner the better.  It is a maxim observable in these days, that the only way to win the game is to play petty Johns.  Of this number is the esquire of the quill, for he hath the grudging of history and some yawnings accordingly.  Writing is a disease in him and holds like a quotidian, so ’tis his infirmity that makes him an author, as Mahomet was beholding to the falling sickness to vouch him a prophet.  That nice artificer who filed a chain so thin and light that a flea could trail it (as if he had worked shorthand, and taught his tools to cypher), did but contrive an emblem for this skipjack and his slight productions.