you tell me, that to affirm the contrary to this, is a praemunire against the statute of the 13th of Elizabeth.  If such praemunire be, pray, answer me, who has most incurred it?  In the mean time, do me the favour to look into the statute-book, and see if you can find the statute; you know yourselves, or you have been told it, that this statute is virtually repealed, by that of the 1st of king James, acknowledging his immediate lawful and undoubted right to this imperial crown, as the next lineal heir; those last words are an implicit anti-declaration to the statute in queen Elizabeth, which, for that reason, is now omitted in our books.  The lawful authority of an House of Commons I acknowledge; but without fear and trembling, as my Reflectors would have it.  For why should I fear my representatives? they are summoned to consult about the public good, and not to frighten those who chose them.  It is for you to tremble, who libel the supreme authority of the nation.  But we knavish coxcombs and villains are to know, say my authors, that “a vote is the opinion of that House.”  Lord help our understandings, that know not this without their telling!  What Englishman, do you think, does not honour his representatives, and wish a parliament void of heat and animosities, to secure the quiet of the nation?  You cite his majesty’s declaration against those that dare trifle with parliaments; a declaration, by the way, which you endeavoured not to have read publicly in churches, with a threatening to those that did it.  “But we still declare (says his majesty) that no irregularities of parliament shall make us out of love with them.”  Are not you unfortunate quoters? why now should you rub up the remembrance of those irregularities mentioned in that declaration, which caused, as the king informs us, its dissolution?

The next paragraph is already answered; it is only a clumsy commendation of the Duke of Monmouth, copied after Mr Hunt, and a proof that he is unlike the Duke of Guise.

After having done my drudgery for me, and having most officiously proved, that the English duke is no parallel for the French, which I am sure he is not, they are next to do their own business, which is, that I meant a parallel betwixt Henry III. and our most gracious sovereign.  But, as fallacies are always couched in general propositions, they plead the whole course of the drama, which, they say, seems to insinuate my intentions.  One may see to what a miserable shift they are driven, when, for want of any one instance, to which I challenge them, they have only to allege, that the play SEEMS to insinuate it.  I answer, it does not seem; which is a bare negative to a bare affirmative; and then we are just where we were before.  Fat Falstaff was never set harder by the Prince for a reason, when he answered, “that, if reasons grew as thick as blackberries, he would not give one.”  Well, after long pumping, lest the lie should appear quite barefaced, they have found I said, that, at king Henry’s birth, there shone a regal star; so there did at king Charles the Second’s; therefore I have made a parallel betwixt Henry III. and Charles II.  A very concluding syllogism, if I should answer it no farther.