After this, I am called, after the old rate, loose and infamous scribbler; and it is well I escape so cheap.  Bear your good fortune moderately, Mr Poet; for, as loose and infamous as I am, if I had written for your party, your pension would have been cut off as useless.  But they must take up with Settle, and such as they can get:  Bartholomew-fair writers[40], and Bartholemew-close printers; there is a famine of wit amongst them, they are forced to give unconscionable rates, and, after all, to have only carrion for their money.

Then, I am “an ignorant fellow for not knowing there were no juries in Paris.”  I do not remember to have written any such thing; but whoever did, I am confident it was not his ignorance.  Perhaps he had a mind to bring the case a little nearer home:  If they had not juries in Paris, we had them from the Normans, who were Frenchmen; and, as you managed them, we had as good have had none in London.  Let it satisfy you we have them now; and some of your loose and infamous scribblers may come to understand it a little better.

The next is, the justification of a noble peer deceased; the case is known, and I have no quarrel to his memory:  let it sleep; he is now before another judge.  Immediately after, I am said to have intended an “abuse to the House of Commons;” which is called by our authors “the most august assembly of Europe.”  They are to prove I have abused that House; but it is manifest they have lessened the House of Lords, by owning the Commons to be the “more august assembly.”—­“It is an House chosen (they say) by every protestant who has a considerable inheritance in England;” which word considerable signifies forty shillings per annum of free land.  For the interest of the loyal party, so much under-valued by our authors, they have long ago confessed in print, that the nobility and gentry have disowned them; and the yeomanry have at last considered, queis haec consevimus arva?  They have had enough of unlawful and arbitrary power; and know what an august assembly they had once without a King and House of Peers.

But now they have me in a burning scent, and run after me full cry:  “Was ever such licence connived at, in an impious libeller and scribbler, that the succession, so solemn a matter, that is not fit to be debated of but in parliament, should be profaned so far as to be played with on the stage?”

Hold a little, gentlemen, hold a little; (as one of your fellow citizens says in “The Duke of Guise,”) is it so unlawful for me to argue for the succession in the right line upon the stage; and is it so very lawful for Mr Hunt, and the scribblers of your party, to oppose it in their libels off the stage?  Is it so sacred, that a parliament only is suffered to debate it, and dare you run it down both in your discourses, and pamphlets out of parliament?  In conscience, what can you urge against me, which I cannot return an hundred times heavier on you?  And by the way,