facts he mentions, most of them being still in memory, especially the story of the Revolution; which, however, is not so well told as might be expected from one who affects to have had so considerable a share in it.  After all, he was a man of generosity and good nature, and very communicative; but, in his ten last years, was absolutely party-mad, and fancied he saw Popery under every bush.  He hath told me many passages not mentioned in this history, and many that are, but with several circumstances suppressed or altered.  He never gives a good character without one essential point, that the person was tender to Dissenters, and thought many things in the Church ought to be amended.

[Footnote 1:  “His own opinion,” says my predecessor, Mr Nichols, “was very different, as appears by the original MS of his History, wherein the following lines are legible, though among those which were ordered not to be printed ’And if I have arrived at any faculty of writing clearly and correctly, I owe that entirely to them [Tillotson and Lloyd].  For as they joined with Wilkins, in that noble, though despised attempt, of an universal character, and a philosophical language; they took great pains to observe all the common errors of language in general, and of ours in particular.  And in the drawing the tables for that work, which was Lloyd’s province, he looked further into a natural purity and simplicity of style, than any man I ever knew; into all which he led me, and so helped me to any measure of exactness of writing, which may be thought to belong to me.’  The above was originally designed to have followed the words, ‘I know from them,’ vol. i. p. 191, 1. 7, fol. ed. near the end of A.D. 1661.” [S]]

[Footnote 2:  Lady Margaret Kennedy, daughter to the Earl of Cassilis. [S.]]

[Footnote 3:  A note in Swift’s Works, vol. ix., pt. ii. [1775] says:  After “detracting,” add “Many of which were stricken through with his own hand, but left legible in the MS.; which he ordered, in his last will, ’his executor to print faithfully, as he left it, without adding, suppressing, or altering it in any particular.’  In the second volume, Judge Burnet, the Bishop’s son and executor, promises that ’the original manuscript of both volumes shall be deposited in the Cotton Library.’  But this promise does not appear to have been fulfilled; at least it certainly was not in 1736, when two letters were printed, addressed to Thomas Burnet, Esq.  In p. 8 of the Second Letter, the writer [Philip Beach] asserted, that he had in his own possession ’an authentic and complete collection of the castrated passages.’” [T.S.]]

Setting up for a maxim, laying down for a maxim, clapt up, decency, and some other words and phrases, he uses many hundred times.

Cut out for a court, a pardoning planet, clapt up, left in the lurch, the mob, outed, a great beauty, went roundly to work: All these phrases used by the vulgar, shew him to have kept mean or illiterate company in his youth.