put into the mouth of a great councillor,
in high trust with His Majesty, and looked upon as a prime-minister. If
Mr. Wood hath no better a manner of representing his patrons, when I
come to be a great man, he shall never be suffered to attend at my
levee. This is not the style of a great minister, it savours too much of
the kettle and the furnace, and came entirely out of Mr. Wood's forge.

As for the threat of making us eat our brogues, we need not be in pain;
for if his coin should pass, that unpolite covering for the feet, would
no longer be a national reproach; because then we should have neither
shoe nor brogue left in the kingdom. But here the falsehood of Mr. Wood
is fairly detected; for I am confident Mr. Walpole never heard of a
brogue in his whole life.[24]

[Footnote 24: A biting sneer at Walpole's ignorance of Irish affairs.
[T.S.]]

As to "swallowing these halfpence in fire-balls," it is a story equally
improbable. For to execute this operation the whole stock of Mr. Wood's
coin and metal must be melted down and moulded into hollow balls with
wild-fire, no bigger than a reasonable throat can be able to swallow.
Now the metal he hath prepared, and already coined will amount at least
fifty millions of halfpence to be swallowed by a million and a half of
people; so that allowing two halfpence to each ball, there will be about
seventeen balls of wild-fire a-piece to be swallowed by every person in
this kingdom, and to administer this dose, there cannot be conveniently
fewer than fifty thousand operators, allowing one operator to every
thirty, which, considering the squeamishness of some stomachs and the
peevishness of young children, is but reasonable. Now, under correction
of better judgments, I think the trouble and charge of such an
experiment would exceed the profit, and therefore I take this report to
be spurious, or at least only a new scheme of Mr. Wood himself, which to
make it pass the better in Ireland he would father upon a minister of
state.

But I will now demonstrate beyond all contradiction that Mr. Walpole is
against this project of Mr. Wood, and is an entire friend to Ireland,
only by this one invincible argument, that he has the universal opinion
of being a wise man, an able minister, and in all his proceedings
pursuing the true interest of the King his master: And that as his
integrity is above all corruption, so is his fortune above all
temptation. I reckon therefore we are perfectly sa