It begins usually with an Ordinance, which is a law still born, dropped before quickened by the royal assent.  ’Tis one of the parliament’s bye-blows, acts only being legitimate, and hath no more sire than a Spanish jennet that is begotten by the wind.

Thus their militia, like its patron Mars, is the issue only of the mother, without the concourse of royal Jupiter:  yet law it is, if they vote it, in defiance to their fundamentals; like the old sexton, who swore his clock went true, whatever the sun said to the contrary.

The next ingredient of a diurnal is plots, horrible plots, which with wonderful sagacity it hunts dry-Coot, while they are yet in their causes, before materia prima can put on her smock.  How many such fits of the mother have troubled the kingdom; and for all Sir W.E. [William Earle] looks like a man-midwife, not yet delivered of so much as a cushion?  But actors must have properties; and since the stages were voted down the only playhouse is at Westminster.

Suitable to their plots are their informers, skippers, and tailors, spaniels both for the land and water.  Good conscionable intelligence!  For however Pym’s bill may inflame the reckoning, the honest vermin have not so much for lying as the public faith.

Thus a zealous botcher in Moorfields, while he was contriving some quirpocut of Church-Government, by the help of his outlying ears and the Otacousticon of the spirit, discovered such a plot, that Selden intends to combat antiquity, and maintain it was a tailor’s goose that preserved the capital.

I wonder my Lord of Canterbury is not once more all to be traitored, for dealing with the lions to settle the Commission of Array in the Tower.  It would do well to cramp the articles dormant, besides the opportunity of reforming these beasts of the prerogative, and changing their profaner names of Harry and Charles into Nehemiah and Eleazar.

Suppose a corn-cutter being to give little Isaac a cast of his office should fall to paring his brows (mistaking the one end for the other, because he branches at both), this would be a plot, and the next diurnal would furnish you with this scale of votes:—­

Resolved upon the question, That this act of the corn-cutter was an absolute invasion of the city’s charter in the representative forehead of Isaac.

Resolved, That the evil counsellors about the corn-cutter are popishly affected and enemies to the State.

Resolved, That there be a public thanksgiving for the great deliverance of Isaac’s brow-antlers; and a solemn covenant drawn up to defy the corn-cutter and all his works.

Thus the Quixotes of this age fight with the windmills of their own heads, quell monsters of their own creation, make plots, and then discover them; as who fitter to unkennel the fox than the terrier that is part of him?

In the third place march their adventures; the Roundheads’ legends, the rebels’ romance; stories of a larger size than the ears of their sect, able to strangle the belief of a Solifidian.