[Footnote 3: Steele.]
[Footnote 4: Piqueerer = pickeerer (modern) = a marauder, a skirmisher in advance of an army. From French picorer = to maraud. [T.S.]
[Footnote 5: Enfant perdu, one of the advanced guard; or, as
Hawkesworth notes it, "one of the forlorn hope." [T.S.]
I was debating with myself, whether this hint of producing a small pamphlet to give notice of a large folio, was not borrowed from the ceremonial in Spanish romances, where a dwarf is sent out upon the battlements to signify to all passengers, what a mighty giant there is in the castle; or whether the Bishop copied this proceeding from the fanfarronade of Monsieur Boufflers, when the Earl of Portland and that general had an interview. Several men were appointed at certain periods to ride in great haste toward the English camp, and cry out, Monseigneur vient, Monseigneur vient: Then, small parties advanced with the same speed and the same cry, and this foppery held for many hours, until the mareschal himself arrived. So here, the Bishop (as we find by his dedication to Mr. Churchill the bookseller) has for a long time sent warning of his arrival by advertisements in Gazettes, and now his Introduction advances to tell us again, Monseigneur vient: In the mean time, we must gape and wait and gaze the Lord knows how long, and keep our spirits in some reasonable agitation, until his Lordship's real self shall think fit to appear in the habit of a folio.
I have seen the same sort of management at a puppet-show. Some puppets of little or no consequence appeared several times at the window to allure the boys and the rabble: The trumpeter sounded often, and the doorkeeper cried a hundred times till he was hoarse, that they were just going to begin; yet after all, we were forced sometimes to wait an hour before Punch himself in person made his entry.
But why this ceremony among old acquaintance? The world and he have long known one another: Let him appoint his hour and make his visit, without troubling us all day with a succession of messages from his laqueys and pages.
With submission, these little arts of getting off an edition, do ill become any author above the size of Marten[6] the surgeon. My Lord tells us, that "many thousands of the two former parts of his History are in the kingdom,"[7] and now he perpetually advertises in the gazette, that he intends to publish the third: This is exactly in the method and style of Marten: "The seventh edition (many thousands of the former editions having been sold off in a small time) of Mr. Marten's book concerning secret diseases," &c.
[Footnote 6: This is John Marten, the author of two treatises on the gout, and a "Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease" (1708?-9). His notoriety brought on him the ire of a "licens'd practitioner in physick and surgery," one J. Spinke, who, in a pamphlet entitled "Quackery Unmask'd" (1709), dealt Marten some most uncourteous blows. From the pamphlet, it is difficult to judge whether Spinke or Marten were the greater quack; we should judge the former. Certainly Marten deserves our sympathy, if only for Spinke's virulence. [T.S.]
[Footnote 7: Page 26.]
Does his Lordship intend to publish his great volume by subscription, and is this Introduction only by way of specimen? I was inclined to think so, because, in the prefixed letter to Mr. Churchill, which introduces this Introduction, there are some dubious expressions: He says, "the advertisements he published were in order to move people to furnish him with materials, which might help him to finish his work with great advantage." If he means half-a-guinea upon the subscription, and t'other half at the delivery, why does he not tell us so in plain terms?