You tell us in your preface to the “No-Protestant Plot",[77] that you shall be forced hereafter to leave off your modesty:  I suppose you mean that little which is left you; for it was worn to rags when you put out this Medal.  Never was there practised such a piece of notorious impudence in the face of an established government.  I believe when he is dead you will wear him in thumb rings, as the Turks did Scanderbeg; as if there were virtue in his bones to preserve you against monarchy.  Yet all this while you pretend not only zeal for the public good, but a due veneration for the person of the king.  But all men who can see an inch before them, may easily detect those gross fallacies.  That it is necessary for men in your circumstances to pretend both, is granted you; for without them there could be no ground to raise a faction.  But I would ask you one civil question, what right has any man among you, or any association of men (to come nearer to you), who, out of parliament, cannot be considered in a public capacity, to meet as you daily do in factious clubs, to vilify the government in your discourses, and to libel it in all your writings?  Who made you judges in Israel?  Or how is it consistent with your zeal for the public welfare, to promote sedition?  Does your definition of loyal, which is to serve the king according to the laws, allow you the licence of traducing the executive power with which you own he is invested?  You complain that his majesty has lost the love and confidence of his people; and by your very urging it, you endeavour what in you lies to make him lose them.  All good subjects abhor the thought of arbitrary power, whether it be in one or many:  if you were the patriots you would seem, you would not at this rate incense the multitude to assume it; for no sober man can fear it, either from the king’s disposition or his practice; or even, where you would odiously lay it, from his ministers.  Give us leave to enjoy the government and the benefit of laws under which we were born, and which we desire to transmit to our posterity.  You are not the trustees of the public liberty; and if you have not right to petition in a crowd, much less have you to intermeddle in the management of affairs; or to arraign what you do not like, which in effect is everything that is done by the king and council.  Can you imagine that any reasonable man will believe you respect the person of his majesty, when it is apparent that your seditious pamphlets are stuffed with particular reflections on him?  If you have the confidence to deny this, it is easy to be evinced from a thousand passages, which I only forbear to quote, because I desire they should die and be forgotten.  I have perused many of your papers; and to show you that I have, the third part of your “No-Protestant Plot” is much of it stolen from your dead author’s pamphlet, called the “Growth of Popery;” as manifestly as Milton’s “Defence of the English People” is from Buchanan “De jure