fiery tail, the stupendous
force of dreadful thunder and earthquakes, and the unrelenting
inundations. Sometimes, with Machiavelian sagacity, thou unravelledst
intrigues of state, and the traitorous conspiracies of rebels, giving
wise counsel to monarchs. How didst thou move our terror and our pity
with thy passionate scenes between Jack Catch and the heroes of the Old
Bailey? How didst thou describe their intrepid march up Holborn Hill?
Nor didst thou shine less in thy theological capacity, when thou gavest
ghostly counsels to dying felons, and didst record the guilty pangs of
Sabbath breakers. How will the noble arts of John Overton's** painting
and sculpture now languish? where rich invention, proper expression,
correct design, divine attitudes, and artful contrast, heightened with
the beauties of Clar. Obscur., embellished thy celebrated pieces, to the
delight and astonishment of the judicious multitude! Adieu, persuasive
eloquence! the quaint metaphor, the poignant irony, the proper epithet,
and the lively simile, are fled for ever! Instead of these, we shall
have, I know not what! The illiterate will tell the rest with pleasure.

* Act restraining the liberty of the press, etc.

** The engraver of the cuts before the Grub Street papers.

I hope the reader will excuse this digression, due by way of condolence
to my worthy brethren of Grub Street, for the approaching barbarity
that is likely to overspread all its regions by this oppressive and
exorbitant tax. It has been my good fortune to receive my education
there; and so long as I preserved some figure and rank amongst the
learned of that society, I scorned to take my degree either at Utrecht
or Leyden, though I was offered it gratis by the professors in those
universities.

And now that posterity may not be ignorant in what age so excellent a
history was written (which would otherwise, no doubt, be the subject of
its inquiries), I think it proper to inform the learned of future times,
that it was compiled when Louis XIV. was King of France, and Philip his
grandson of Spain; when England and Holland, in conjunction with the
Emperor and the Allies, entered into a war against these two princes,
which lasted ten years, under the management of the Duke of Marlborough,
and was put to a conclusion by the Treaty of Utrecht, under the ministry
of the Earl of Oxford, in the year 1713.

Many at that time did imagine the history of John Bull, and the
persona