and disorder. The Roman priest
had no success, (God be thanked,) when he animated the people not to
suffer the same sheriffs to be carried through the city to the
Tower, prisoners. Now the poet hath undertaken, for their being
kicked three or four times a-week about the stage to the gallows,
infamously rogued and rascalled, to try what he can do towards
making the charter forfeitable, by some extravagancy and disorder of
the people, which the authority of the best governed cities have not
been able to prevent, sometimes under far less provocations.

"But this ought not to move the citizens, when he hath so
maliciously and mischievously represented the king, and the king's
son, nay, and his favourite the duke too, to whom he gives the worst
strokes of his unlucky fancy.

"He puts the king under the person of Henry III. of France, who
appeared in the head of the _Parisian_ massacre; the king's son
under the person of the Duke of Guise, who concerted it with the
Queen-mother of France, and was slain in that very place, by the
righteous judgment of God, where he and his mother had first
contrived it.

"The Duke of Guise ought to have represented a great prince, that
had inserved to some most detestable villany, to please the rage, or
lust, of a tyrant.

"Such great courtiers have been often sacrificed, to appease the
furies of the tyrant's guilty conscience, to expiate for his sin,
and to atone the people.

"Besides, that a tyrant naturally stands in fear of ministers of
mighty wickedness; he is always obnoxious to them, he is a slave to
them, as long as they live they remember him of his guilt, and awe
him. These wicked slaves become most imperious masters: they drag
him to greater evils for their own impunity, than they first
perpetrated for his pleasure, and their own ambition.

"But such are best given up to public justice, but by no means to be
assassinated. Until this age, never before was an assassination
invited, commended, and encouraged upon a public theatre.

"It is no wonder that _Trimmers_ (so they call men of some
moderation of that party) displease them; for they seem to have
designs for which it behoves them to know their men; they must be
perfectly wicked, or perfectly deceived; of the Catiline make; bold,
and without understanding; that can adhere to men that publicly
profess murders, and applaud the design.

"Caius