enough, and able to bear it. To this purpose I have sometimes reflected upon the difference between Athens and England with respect to the point before us. In the Attic commonwealth it was the privilege and birthright of every citizen and poet to rail aloud and in public, or to expose upon the stage by name any person they pleased, though of the greatest figure, whether a Creon, a Hyperbolus, an Alcibiades, or a Demosthenes. But, on the other side, the least reflecting word let fall against the people in general was immediately caught up and revenged upon the authors, however considerable for their quality or their merits. Whereas in England it is just the reverse of all this. Here you may securely display your utmost rhetoric against mankind, in the face of the world; tell them that all are gone astray; that here is none that doeth good, no, not one; that we live in the very dregs of time; that knavery and atheism are epidemic as the small-pox; that honesty is fled with Astræa; with any other commonplaces, equally new and eloquent, which are furnished by the splendida bilis; † and when you have done, the whole audience, far from being offended, shall return you thanks as a deliverer of precious and useful truths. Nay, farther; it is but to venture your lungs, and you may preach in Covent Garden against * Vide Xenophon. † Horace. Spleen.

foppery and fornication, and something else; against pride and dissimulation and bribery at Whitehall : you may expose rapine and injustice in the inns of court chapel, and in a city pulpit be as fierce as you please against avarice, hypocrisy, and extortion. It is but a ball bandied to and fro, and every man carries a racket about him to strike it from himself among the rest of the company. But on the other side, whoever should mistake the nature of things so far as to drop but a single hint in public how such a one starved half the fleet, and half poisoned the rest; how such a one, from a true principle of love and honour, pays no debts but for women and play; how such a one has got a running sore and runs out of his estate; how Paris, bribed by Juno and Venus,* loth to offend either party, slept out the whole cause on the bench; or how such an orator makes long speeches in the senate with much thought, little sense, and to no purpose: whoever, I say, should venture to be thus particular must expect to be imprisoned for scandalum magnatum, to have challenges sent him, to be sued for defamation, and to be brought before the bar of the house.

But I forgot that I am expatiating on a subject

* Juno and Venus are money and a mistress, very powerful bribes to a judge, if scandal says true. I remember such reflections were cast about at that time, but I cannot fix the person intended here.

wherein I have no concern, having neither a talent nor an inclination for satire. On the other side, I am so entirely satisfied with the whole present procedure of human things, that I have been some years preparing materials towards A Panegyric upon the World, to which I intended to add a second part, intituled, A Modest Defence of the Proceedings of the Rabble in all Ages. Both these I had thought to publish by way of appendix to the following treatise; but finding my commonplace book fill much slower than I had reason to expect, I have chosen to defer them to another occasion. Besides, I have been unhappily prevented in that design by a certain. domestic misfortune, in the particulars whereof, though it would be very seasonable and much in the modern way to inform the gentle reader, and would also be of great assistance towards extending this preface into the size now in vogue, which by rule ought to be as large in proportion as the subsequent volume is small, yet I shall now dismiss our impatient reader from any farther attendance at the porch, and having duly prepared his mind by a preliminary discourse, shall gladly introduce him to the sublime mysteries that ensue.

A TALE OF A TUB.

SECTION I.

THE INTRODUCTION.

WHOEVER hath an ambition to be heard in a crowd must press and squeeze and thrust and climb with indefatigable pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain degree of altitude above them. Now, in all assemblies, though you wedge them ever so close, we may observe this peculiar property, that over their heads there is room enough, but how to reach it is the difficult point, it being as hard to get quit of number as of hell;

To this end, the philosopher's way in all ages has been by erecting certain edifices in the air. But

But to return, and view the cheerful skies ;

In this the task and mighty labour lies.