tory, when a learned divine hath in a late treatise proved the sun to be hell®.

I shall now, before I conclude, desire the reader to compare this key with those upon any other pieces, which are supposed to have been secret satires upon the state, either ancient or modern; in particular with the keys to Petronius Arbiter, Lucian's true History, Barclay's Argenis, and Rabelais's Garagantua; and I doubt not he will do me the justice to acknowledge, that the explanations here laid down, are reduced as naturally, and with as little violence, both from the general scope and bent of the work, and from the several particulars: furthermore, that they are every way as consistent and undeniable, every way as candid, as any modern interpretation of either party on the conduct and writings of the other. And I appeal to the most eminent and able state decipherers themselves, if, according to their art, any thing can be more fully proved, or more safely sworn to?

To sum up my whole charge against this author in a few words: he has ridiculed both the present ministry and the last; abused great statesmen and great generals; nay the treaties of whole nations have not escaped him, nor has the royal dignity itself been omitted in the progress of his satire; and all this he has done just at the meeting of a new parliament. I hope a proper authority may be made use of to bring him to condign punishment. In the

The Reverend Dr. Swinden.

mean while I doubt not, if the persons most concerned would but order Mr. Bernard Lintot, the printer and publisher of this dangerous piece, to be taken into custody and examined, many farther discoveries might be made, both of this poet's and abettor's designs, which are doubtless of the utmost importance to the government.

381

THOUGHTS

ON

VARIOUS SUBJECTS.

PARTY is the madness of many, for the gain

of a few.

There never was any party, faction, sect, or cabal, whatsoever, in which the most ignorant were not the most violent: for a bee is not a busier animal than a blockhead. However, such instruments are necessary to Politicians; and perhaps it may be with states as with clocks, which must have some dead weight hanging at them, to help and regulate the motion of the finer and more useful parts.

To endeavour to work upon the vulgar with fine sense, is like attempting to hew blocks with a razor.

Fine sense and exalted sense are not half so useful as common sense. There are forty men of wit for one man of sense; and he that will carry nothing about him but gold, will be every day at a loss for want of readier change.

Learning is like mercury, one of the most powerful and excellent things in the world in skilful hands; in unskilful, the most mischievous.

The nicest constitutions of government are often like the finest pieces of clock-work, which depending on so many motions, are therefore more subject to be out of order.

Every man has just as much vanity as he wants understanding.

Modesty, if it were to be recommended for nothing else, this were enough, that the pretending to little leaves a man at ease; whereas boasting requires a perpetual labour to appear what he is not: if we have none, it best hides our want of it. For as blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.

It is not so much the being exempt from faults, as as the having overcome them, that is an advantage to us; it being with the follies of the mind as with the weeds of a field, which, if destroyed and consumed upon the place of their birth, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung there.

To pardon those absurdities in ourselves which we cannot suffer in others, is neither better nor worse than to be more willing to be fools ourselves than to have others so.

A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday.

The best way to prove the clearness of our mind, is by shewing its faults; as when a stream disco