Those who think themselves concerned, may give you thanks for that gracious liberty you are pleased to allow them of “taking vengeance on the ministers, and there shooting their envenomed arrows.”  As to myself; I neither owe you vengeance, nor make use of such weapons:  but it is your weakness, or ill fortune, or perhaps the fault of your constitution, to convert wholesome remedies into poison; for you have received better and more frequent instructions than any minister of your age and country, if God had given you the grace to apply them.

I dare promise you the thanks of half the kingdom, if you will please to perform the promise you have made of suffering the Craftsman and company, or whatever other “infamous wretches and execrable villains” you mean, to take their vengeance only on your own sacred ministerial person, without bringing any of your brethren, much less the most remote branch of the Royal Family, into the debate.  This generous offer I suspected from the first; because there were never heard of so many, so unnecessary, and so severe prosecutions as you have promoted during your ministry, in a kingdom where the liberty of the press is so much pretended to be allowed.  But in reading a page or two, I found you thought it proper to explain away your grant; for there you tell us, that “these miscreants” (meaning the writers against you) “are to remember that the laws have ABUNDANTLY LESS generous, less mild and merciful sentiments” than yourself, and into their secular hands the poor authors must be delivered to fines, prisons, pillories, whippings, and the gallows.  Thus your promise of impunity, which began somewhat jesuitically, concludes with the mercy of a Spanish inquisitor.

If it should so happen that I am neither “abettor, patron, protector,” nor “supporter” of these imaginary invectives “against the King, her Majesty, or any of the Royal Family,” I desire to know what satisfaction I am to get from you, or the creature you employed in writing the libel which I am now answering?  It will be no excuse to say, that I differ from you in every particular of your political reason and practise; because that will be to load the best, the soundest, and most numerous part of the kingdom with the denominations you are pleased to bestow upon me, that they are “Jacobites, wicked miscreants, infamous wretches, execrable villains, and defamers of the King, Queen, and all the Royal Family,” and “guilty of high treason.”  You cannot know my style; but I can easily know your works, which are performed in the sight of the sun.  Your good inclinations are visible; but I begin to doubt the strength of your credit, even at court, that you have not power to make his Majesty believe me the person which you represent in your libel:  as most infallibly you have often attempted, and in vain, because I must otherwise have found it by the marks of his royal displeasure.  However, to be angry with you to whom I am indebted for the greatest