I am certain; for nobody saw him there, and he is not of a size to be concealed.  But the mountain, they say, was delivered of a mouse.  I have been gossip to many such labours of a dull fat scribbler, where the mountain has been bigger, and the mouse less.  The next sally is on the city-elections, and a charge is brought against my lord mayor, and the two sheriffs, for excluding true electors.  I have heard, that a Whig gentleman of the Temple hired a livery-gown, to give his voice among the companies at Guild-hall; let the question be put, whether or no he were a true elector?—­Then their own juries are commended from several topics; they are the wisest, richest, and most conscientious:  to which is answered, ignoramus.  But our juries give most prodigious and unheard-of damages.  Hitherto there is nothing but boys-play in our authors:  My mill grinds pepper and spice, your mill grinds rats and mice. They go on,—­“if I may be allowed to judge;” (as men that do not poetize may be judges of wit, human nature, and common decencies;) so then the sentence is begun with I; there is but one of them puts in for a judge’s place, that is, he in the grey; but presently it is—­men; two more in buckram would be judges too.  Neither of them, it seems, poetize; that is true, but both of them are in at rhime doggrel; witness the song against the bishops, and the Tunbridge ballad[35].  By the way, I find all my scribbling enemies have a mind to be judges, and chief barons.  Proceed, gentlemen:—­“This play, as I am informed by some, who have a nearer communication with the poets and the players, than I have,—­“.  Which of the two Sosias is it that now speaks?  If the lawyer, it is true he has but little communication with the players; if the poet, the players have but little communication with him; for it is not long ago, he said to somebody, “By G——­, my lord, those Tory rogues will act none of my plays.”  Well, but the accusation,—­that this play was once written by another, and then it was called the “Parisian Massacre.”  Such a play I have heard indeed was written; but I never saw it[36].  Whether this be any of it or no, I can say no more than for my own part of it.  But pray, who denies the unparalleled villainy of the papists in that bloody massacre?  I have enquired, why it was not acted, and heard it was stopt by the interposition of an ambassador, who was willing to save the credit of his country, and not to have the memory of an action so barbarous revived; but that I tempted my friend to alter it, is a notorious whiggism, to save the broader word.  The “Sicilian Vespers” I have had plotted by me above these seven years:  the story of it I found under borrowed names in Giraldo Cinthio; but the rape in my tragedy of “Amboyna” was so like it, that I forbore the writing.  But what had this to do with protestants?  For the massacrers and the massacred were all papists.

But it is observable, they say, that “though the massacre could not be acted, as it was first written against papists, yet when it was turned upon protestants, it found reception.”