they should be treason.  Fall severely on the miscarriages of Government; for if scandal be not allowed, you are no free-born subjects.  If GOD has not blessed you with the talent of rhyming, make use of my poor stock and welcome; let your verses run upon my feet:  and for the utmost refuge of notorious blockheads, reduced to the last extremity of sense, turn my own lines upon me, and, in utter despair of your own satire, make me satirize myself.  Some of you have been driven to this bay already; but above all the rest, commend me to the Non-conformist parson, who writ The Whip and Key.  I am afraid it is not read so much as the piece deserves, because the bookseller is every week crying Help, at the end of his Gazette, to get it off.  You see I am charitable enough to do him a kindness, that it may be published as well as printed; and that so much skill in Hebrew derivations may not lie for waste-paper in the shop.  Yet I half suspect he went no farther for his learning, than the index of Hebrew names and etymologies, which is printed at the end of some English bibles.  If Achitophel signify the brother of a fool, the author of that poem will pass with his readers for the next of kin.  And, perhaps, ’tis the relation that makes the kindness.  Whatever the verses are, buy them up, I beseech you, out of pity; for I hear the conventicle is shut up, and the brother of Achitophel out of service.

Now footmen, you know, have the generosity to make a purse, for a member of their society, who has had his livery pulled over his ears:  and even Protestant flocks are brought up among you, out of veneration to the name.  A dissenter in poetry from sense and English, will make as good a Protestant rhymer, as a dissenter from the Church of England a Protestant parson.  Besides, if you encourage a young beginner, who knows but he may elevate his style a little, above the vulgar epithets of profane and saucy Jack, and atheistic scribbler, with which he treats me, when the fit of enthusiasm is strong upon him?  By which well-manner’d and charitable expressions, I was certain of his sect, before I knew his name.  What would you have more of a man?  He has damned me in your cause from Genesis to the Revelations; and has half the texts of both the Testaments against me, if you will be so civil to yourselves as to take him for your interpreter, and not to take them for Irish witnesses.  After all, perhaps, you will tell me, that you retained him only for the opening of your cause, and that your main lawyer is yet behind.  Now, if it so happen he meet with no more reply than his predecessors, you may either conclude, that I trust to the goodness of my cause, or fear my adversary, or disdain him, or what you please; for the short on it is, it is indifferent to your humble servant, whatever your party says or thinks of him.

DANIEL DEFOE.

(1661-1734)

XXI.  INTRODUCTION TO THE TRUE-BORN ENGLISHMAN.