But mark the wise consequences of our author.  “I have not,” he says, “so much art left me to make any thing agreeable, or verisimilar, wherewith to amuse or deceive the people.”  And yet, in the very next paragraph, “my province is to corrupt the manners of the nation, and lay waste their morals, and my endeavours are more happily applied, to extinguish the little remainders of the virtue of the age.”  Now, I am to perform all this, it seems, without making any thing verisimilar or agreeable!  Why, Pharaoh never set the Israelites such a task, to build pyramids without brick or straw.  If the fool knows it not, verisimilitude and agreeableness are the very tools to do it; but I am willing to disclaim them both, rather than to use them to so ill purpose as he has done.

Yet even this their celebrated writer knows no more of stile and English than the Northern dictator; as if dulness and clumsiness were fatal to the name of Tom.  It is true, he is a fool in three languages more than the poet; for, they say, “he understands Latin, Greek, and Hebrew,” from all which, to my certain knowledge, I acquit the other.  Og may write against the king, if he pleases, so long as he drinks for him, and his writings will never do the government so much harm, as his drinking does it good; for true subjects will not be much perverted by his libels; but the wine-duties rise considerably by his claret.  He has often called me an atheist in print; I would believe more charitably of him, and that he only goes the broad way, because the other is too narrow for him.  He may see, by this, I do not delight to meddle with his course of life, and his immoralities, though I have a long bead-roll of them.  I have hitherto contented myself with the ridiculous part of him, which is enough, in all conscience, to employ one man; even without the story of his late fall at the Old Devil, where he broke no ribs, because the hardness of the stairs could reach no bones; and, for my part, I do not wonder how he came to fall, for I have always known him heavy:  the miracle is, how he got up again.  I have heard of a sea captain as fat as he, who, to escape arrests, would lay himself flat upon the ground, and let the bailiffs carry him to prison, if they could.  If a messenger or two, nay, we may put in three or four, should come, he has friendly advertisement how to escape them.  But to leave him, who is not worth any further consideration, now I have done laughing at him,—­would every man knew his own talent, and that they, who are only born for drinking, would let both poetry and prose alone[32]!