As for the City Bard, or Knight Physician, I hear his quarrel to me is, that I was the author of Absalom and Achitophel, which he thinks is a little hard on his fanatic patrons in London.

But I will deal the more civilly with his two poems, because nothing ill is to be spoken of the dead; and therefore peace be to the manes of his Arthurs!  I will only say, that it was not for this noble knight that I drew the plan of an Epic poem on King Arthur, in my preface to the translation of Juvenal.  The guardian angels of kingdoms were machines too ponderous for him to manage; and therefore he rejected them, as Dares did the whirlbats of Eryx, when they were thrown before him by Entellus.  Yet from that preface he plainly took his hint; for he began immediately upon the story, though he had the baseness not to acknowledge his benefactor, but instead of it, to traduce me in a libel.

I shall say the less of Mr Collier, because in many things he has taxed me justly; and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mine, which can be truly argued of obscenity, profaneness, or immorality; and retract them.  If he be my enemy, let him triumph; if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance.  It becomes me not to draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good one.  Yet it were not difficult to prove, that in many places he has perverted my meaning by his glosses; and interpreted my words into blasphemy and bawdry, of which they were not guilty; besides that he is too much given to horse-play in his raillery; and comes to battle like a dictator from the plough.  I will not say, the zeal of God’s house has eaten him up; but I am sure it has devoured some part of his good-manners and civility.  It might also be doubted whether it were altogether zeal which prompted him to this rough manner of proceeding:  perhaps it became not one of his function to rake into the rubbish of ancient and modern plays:  a divine might have employed his pains to better purpose than in the nastiness of Plautus and Aristophanes; whose examples, as they excuse not me, so it might be possibly supposed that he read them not without some pleasure.  They who have written commentaries on those poets, or on Horace, Juvenal, and Martial, have explained some vices, which without their interpretation had been unknown to modern times.  Neither has he judged impartially betwixt the former age and us.

There is more bawdry in one play of Fletcher’s, called “The Custom of the Country,” than in all ours together.  Yet this has been often acted on the stage in my remembrance.  Are the times so much more reformed now, than they were five-and-twenty years ago?  If they are, I congratulate the amendment of our morals.  But I am not to prejudice the cause of my fellow-poets, though I abandon my own defence.  They have some of them answered for themselves, and