As a corollary to this preface, in which I have done justice to others, I owe somewhat to myself:  not that I think it worth my time to enter the lists with one M——­,[34] or one B——­,[35] but barely to take notice, that such men there are who have written scurrilously against me, without any provocation.  M——­, who is in orders, pretends amongst the rest this quarrel to me, that I have fallen foul on priesthood:  if I have, I am only to ask pardon of good priests, and am afraid his part of the reparation will come to little.  Let him to satisfied that he shall not be able to force himself upon me for an adversary.  I contemn him too much to enter into competition with him.  His own translations of Virgil have answer’d his criticisms on mine.  If (as they say he has declar’d in print) he prefers the version of Ogleby to mine, the world has made him the same compliment:  for ’t is agreed on all hands, that he writes even below Ogleby:  that, you will say, is not easily to be done; but what cannot M——­ bring about?  I am satisfied, however, that while he and I live together, I shall not be thought the worst poet of the age.  It looks as if I had desir’d him underhand to write so ill against me; but upon my honest word I have not brib’d him to do me this service, and am wholly guiltless of his pamphlet.  ’T is true, I should be glad if I could persuade him to continue his good offices, and write such another critique on anything of mine for I find by experience he has a great stroke with the reader, when he condemns any of my poems, to make the world have a better opinion of them.  He has taken some pains with my poetry, but nobody will be persuaded to take the same with his.  If I had taken to the Church, (as he affirms, but which was never in my thoughts,) I should have had more sense, if not more grace, than to have turn’d myself out of my benefice by writing libels on my parishioners.  But his account of my manners and my principles are of a piece with his cavils and his poetry; and so I have done with him for ever.

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, tho’ he had the baseness not to acknowledge his benefactor but, instead of it, to traduce me in a libel.