“They have already condemned the charter and city, and have executed the magistrates in effigy upon the stage, in a play called “The Duke of Guise,” frequently acted and applauded; intended most certainly, to provoke the rabble into tumults and disorder.  The Roman priest had no success, (God be thanked,) when he animated the people not to suffer the same sheriffs to be carried through the city to the Tower, prisoners.  Now the poet hath undertaken, for their being kicked three or four times a-week about the stage to the gallows, infamously rogued and rascalled, to try what he can do towards making the charter forfeitable, by some extravagancy and disorder of the people, which the authority of the best governed cities have not been able to prevent, sometimes under far less provocations.

“But this ought not to move the citizens, when he hath so maliciously and mischievously represented the king, and the king’s son, nay, and his favourite the duke too, to whom he gives the worst strokes of his unlucky fancy.

“He puts the king under the person of Henry III. of France, who appeared in the head of the Parisian massacre; the king’s son under the person of the Duke of Guise, who concerted it with the Queen-mother of France, and was slain in that very place, by the righteous judgment of God, where he and his mother had first contrived it.

  “The Duke of Guise ought to have represented a great prince, that
  had inserved to some most detestable villany, to please the rage, or
  lust, of a tyrant.

  “Such great courtiers have been often sacrificed, to appease the
  furies of the tyrant’s guilty conscience, to expiate for his sin,
  and to atone the people.

“Besides, that a tyrant naturally stands in fear of ministers of mighty wickedness; he is always obnoxious to them, he is a slave to them, as long as they live they remember him of his guilt, and awe him.  These wicked slaves become most imperious masters:  they drag him to greater evils for their own impunity, than they first perpetrated for his pleasure, and their own ambition.

  “But such are best given up to public justice, but by no means to be
  assassinated.  Until this age, never before was an assassination
  invited, commended, and encouraged upon a public theatre.

“It is no wonder that Trimmers (so they call men of some moderation of that party) displease them; for they seem to have designs for which it behoves them to know their men; they must be perfectly wicked, or perfectly deceived; of the Catiline make; bold, and without understanding; that can adhere to men that publicly profess murders, and applaud the design.

“Caius Caesar (to give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s) was in the Catiline conspiracy; and then the word was, he that is not for us is against us; for the instruments of