And now, for a relishing bit before we rise, he has kept in store for us the four points, which, about the midst of her Paper, the Duchess told us she found so easy in the scripture, that she wondered she had been so long without finding them. He will needs fall into dispute with her about them, though he knows beforehand that she will not dispute with him. This is a kind of petition to her, that she will permit him to make that difficult which she found easy; for every thing becomes hard by chopping logick upon it. I am sure enough, that the wall before me is white, and that I can go to it; but put me once upon unriddling sophisms, I shall not be satisfied of what colour the wall is, nor how it is possible for me to stir from the place in which I am. Alas! if people would be as much in earnest as she was, and read the scriptures with the same disposition, the same unprejudiced sincerity in their hearts, and docility in their understanding, seeking to bend their judgments to what they find, not what they find to their judgments, more, I believe, would find things as easy as she did, and give the Answerer more frequent occasion for his derision of a willing mind.

But not to dilate on that matter, I presume he will not pretend by his disputing to make any thing plainly appear against her; if he can, let him do it, and end controversy in a moment; for every one can see plain things, and all Christians must be concluded by the scripture. But he knows well enough there is no such thing to be

performed. A mist may be raised, and interposed, through which the eye shall not discern what otherwise it would, if nothing but the due medium were betwixt, and the object before it... And that is all the fruit of this sort of disputation, and all the assistance, for which the Answerer was so earnest. Upon the whole, his mortal quarrel to the Duchess is, that she would not become an experiment of the perfection to which the art of learned obscurity is improved in this our age; and the honour he has done to the church of England is, that he has used her name to countenance the defamation of a lády. I suspected whither he would bring it, when I saw that honour pretended in the beginning of his pamphlet. If he thinks his Bishops have reflected a scandal on his church by their discourses with the Duchess, he ought to have proceeded a more reasonable way than to insinuate that she forged them, without proving it. If she had been living, and he had subscribed his name to so infamous a libel, he knows the English of a scandalum magnatum; for an inuendo is considered in that case; and three indirect insinuations will go as far in law towards the giving a downright lie, as three foils will go towards a fall in wrestling.

To conclude: I leave it to the judgment of the impartial reader what occasion our Answerer has had for his song of triumph at the end of his scurrilous saucy pamphlet. I have treated him as one single Answerer, though, properly speaking, his name is Legion; but though the body be

possessed with many evil spirits, it is but one of them who talks. Let him disguise his defeat by the ringing of his bells it was an old Dutch policy, when the Duke had beaten them, to make bonfires; for that kept the populace in heart. Our author knows he has all the common people on his side, and they only read the Gazettes of their own writers; so that every thing which is called an Answer is with them a confutation, and the Turk and Pope are their sworn enemies, ever since Robin Wisdom' was inspired to join them together in a godly ballad. In the mean time, the spirit of meekness and humble charity would become our author better than his boasts for this imaginary victory, or his reflection upon God's anointed; but it is the less to be admired that he is such a stranger to that spirit, because, among all the volumes of divinity written by the protestants, there is not one original treatise, at least, that I have seen or heard of, which has handled distinctly, and by itself, that Christian virtue of

HUMILITY.2

• Robin Wisdom's Psalms were much in vogue with the fanaticks of the last century. See Overbury's Character of a PRECISIAN. The godly ballad here alluded to, I recollect to have seen, but cannot at present turn to it.

2 This Stillingfleet, in his Reply, says, is " a barefaced assertion of a thing known to be false;" for "within a few years, besides what has been printed formerly, such a book hath been published in London."-See what our author has further said on this subject in his preface to THE HIND AND THE PANTHER.

PREFACE

TO

THE HIND AND THE PANTHER,

A POEM. 3

THE nation is in too high a ferment for me to expect either fair war, or even so much as fair quarter from a reader of the opposite party. All

3 This poem, which consists of about two thousand five hundred lines, was first published in quarto in the middle of the year 1687, and in that year passed through at least three editions.

THE HIND AND THE PANTHER, Dr. Johnson observes, is "the longest of all Dryden's original pieces; an allegory intended to comprize and to decide the controversy between the Romanists and Protestants. The scheme of the work is injudicious and incommodious; for what can be more absurd than that one beast should counsel another to rest her faith upon a Pope and Council. He seems well enough skilled in the usual topicks of argument, endeavours to shew the necessity of an infallible Judge, and reproaches the Reformers with want of unity; but is weak enough to ask, why, since we see without knowing how, we may not have an infallible Judge without knowing where ?

The Hind at one time is afraid to drink at the common brook, because she may be worried; but walking home with the Panther, talks by the way of the Nicene Fathers, and at last declares herself to be the catholick church.

men are engaged either on this side or that; and though conscience is the common word which is given by both, yet if a writer fall among enemies, and cannot give the marks of their conscience, he is knocked down, before the reasons of his own are heard. A Preface, therefore, which is but a bespeaking of favour, is altogether useless. What I desire the reader should know concerning me, he will find in the body of the poem, if he have but the patience to peruse it; only this advertisement let him take beforehand, which relates to the merits of the cause.

No general characters of parties (call them either sects or churches,) can be so fully and exactly drawn, as to comprehend all the several members of them; at least all such as are received under that denomination. For example; there are some of the church by law established, who envy not liberty of conscience to dissenters, as

This absurdity was very properly ridiculed in the CITY MOUSE and COUNTRY MOUSE of Montague and Prior; and in the detection and censure of the incongruity of the fiction chiefly consists the value of their performance; which, whatever reputation it might obtain by the help of temporary passions, seems to readers almost a century. distant, not very forcible or animated."

"Did not Lord Halifax write the COUNTRY MOUSE with Prior?" said Mr. Spence to Lord Peterborough."Yes," replied Lord Peterborough, "just as if I was in a chaise with Mr. Cheselden here, drawn by his fine horse, and should say,-Lord! how finely we draw this chaise!" Spence's ANECDotes.