FROM THURSDAY FEBRUARY 8, TO THURSDAY FEBRUARY 15, 1710-11.
Inultus ut tu riseris Cotyttia?[2]
An Answer to the "Letter to the Examiner."[3]
London, Feb. 15, 1710/11.
Sir,
Though I have wanted leisure to acknowledge the honour of a letter you were pleased to write to me about six months ago; yet I have been very careful in obeying some of your commands, and am going on as fast as I can with the rest. I wish you had thought fit to have conveyed them to me by a more private hand, than that of the printing-house: for though I was pleased with a pattern of style and spirit which I proposed to imitate, yet I was sorry the world should be a witness how far I fell short in both.
I am afraid you did not consider what an abundance of work you have cut out for me; neither am I at all comforted by the promise you are so kind to make, that when I have performed my task,[4] "D[olbe]n shall blush in his grave among the dead, W[alpo]le among the living, and even Vol[pon]e shall feel some remorse." How the gentleman in his grave may have kept his countenance, I cannot inform you, having no acquaintance at all with the sexton; but for the other two, I take leave to assure you, there have not yet appeared the least signs of blushing or remorse in either, though some very good opportunities have offered, if they had thought fit to accept them; so that with your permission, I had rather engage to continue this work till they are in their graves too, which I am sure will happen much sooner than the other.
You desire I would collect "some of those indignities offered last year to her M[ajest]y." I am ready to oblige you; and have got a pretty tolerable collection by me, which I am in doubt whether to publish by itself in a large volume in folio, or scatter them here and there occasionally in my papers. Though indeed I am sometimes thinking to stifle them altogether; because such a history will be apt to give foreigners a monstrous opinion of our country. But since it is your absolute opinion, the world should be informed; I will with the first occasion pick out a few choice instances, and let them take their chance in the ensuing papers. I have likewise in my cabinet certain quires of paper filled with facts of corruption, mismanagement, cowardice, treachery, avarice, ambition, and the like, with an alphabetical table, to save trouble. And perhaps you will not wonder at the care I take to be so well provided, when you consider the vast expense I am at: I feed weekly two or three wit-starved writers, who have no other visible support; besides several others that live upon my offals. In short, I am like a nurse who suckles twins at one time, and has likewise one or two whelps constantly to draw her breasts.
I must needs confess, (and it is with grief I speak it) that I have been the innocent cause of a great circulation of dullness: at the same time, I have often wondered how it has come to pass, that these industrious people, after poring so constantly upon the "Examiner,"[5] a paper writ with plain sense, and in a tolerable style, have made so little improvement. I am sure it would have fallen out quite otherwise with me; for, by what I have seen of their performances (and I am credibly informed they are all of a piece) if I had perused them till now, I should have been fit for little but to make an advocate in the same cause.
You, Sir, perhaps will wonder, as most others do, what end these angry folks propose, in writing perpetually against the "Examiner": it is not to beget a better opinion of the late ministry, or with any hope to convince the world that I am in the wrong in any one fact I relate; they know all that to be lost labour; and yet their design is important enough: they would fain provoke me by all sort of methods, within the length of their capacity, to answer their papers; which would render mine wholly useless to the public; for if it once came to rejoinder and reply, we should be all upon a level, and then their work would be done.