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ejaculation. She maintained 'twas an entire infraction of the treaty.—I maintained it was provided for in the clause of the third article.

The lady would by no means give up the point, though she weakened her barrier by it; for, in the warmth of the dispute, I could hear two or three corking pins fall out of the curtain to the ground.

-Upon my word and honour, Madame, said I, stretching my arm out of bed by way of asseveration,

(I was going to have added, that I would not have trespassed against the remotest idea of decorum for the world)

—But the fille de chambre hearing there were words between us, and fearing that hostilities would ensue in course, had crept silently out of her closet; and it being totally dark, had stolen so close to our beds, that she had got herself into the narrow passage which separated them, and had advanced so far up as to be in a line betwixt her mistress and me;—

So that, when I stretched out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre's

A TALE OF A TUB.

THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY.

IF good and ill nature equally operated upon mankind, I might have saved myself the trouble of this apology; for it is manifest, by the reception the following discourse hath met with, that those who approve it are a great majority among the men of taste; yet there have been two or three treatises written expressly against it, besides many others that have flirted at it occasionally, without one syllable having been ever published in its defence, or even quotation to its advantage, that I can remember, except by the polite author of a late discourse between a deist and a Socinian.

Therefore, since the book seems calculated to live at least as long as our language, and our taste admits. no great alterations, I am content to convey some apology along with it.

The greatest part of that book was finished about thirteen years since (1696), which is eight years before it was published. The author was then

young, his invention at the height, and his reading fresh in his head. By the assistance of some thinking, and much conversation, he had endeavoured to strip himself of as many real prejudices as he could; I say real ones, because under the notion of prejudices he knew to what dangerous heights some men have proceeded. Thus prepared, he thought the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and learning might furnish matter for a satire that would be useful and diverting: he resolved to proceed in a manner that should be altogether new, the world having been already too long nauseated with endless repetitions upon every subject. The abuses in religion he proposed to set forth in the allegory of the coats and the three brothers, which was to make up the body of the discourse. Those in learning he chose to introduce by way of digressions. He was then a young gentleman much in the world, and wrote to the taste of those who were like himself; therefore in order to allure them, he gave a liberty to his pen which might not suit with maturer years or graver characters, and which he could have easily corrected with a very few blots, had he been master of his papers for a year or two before their publication.

Not that he would have governed his judgment by the ill-placed cavils of the sour, the envious, the

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