t if Jack Ketch must needs have the handling of us poets, let
him begin first where he may take the deepest say[41]; let me be
hanged, but in my turn; for I am sure I am neither the fattest
scribbler, nor the worst; I'll be judged by their own party. But, for
all our comforts, the days of hanging are a little out of date; and I
hope there will be no more treason with a witness or witnesses; for
now there is no more to be got by swearing, and the market is
overstocked besides.

But are you in earnest when you say, I have made Henry III. "fearful,
weak, bloody, perfidious, hypocritical, and fawning, in the play?" I
am sure an unbiassed reader will find a more favourable image of him
in the tragedy, whatever he was out of it. You would not have told a
lie so shameless, but that you were resolved to second it with a
worse--that I made a parallel of that prince. And now it comes to my
turn, pray let me ask you,--why you spend three pages and a half in
heaping up all the villainies, true or false, which you can rake
together, to blast his memory? Why is all this pains taken to expose
the person of king Henry III.? Are you leaguers, or covenanters, or
associators? What has the poor dead man done to nettle you? Were his
rebels your friends or your relations? Were your Norman ancestors of
any of those families, which were conspirators in the play? I smell a
rat in this business; Henry III. is not taken thus to task for
nothing. Let me tell you, this is little better than an implicit
confession of the parallel I intended. This gentleman of Valois sticks
in your stomachs; and, though I do not defend his proceedings in the
States, any otherwise than by the inevitable necessity which caused
them, yet acknowledging his crime does not extenuate their guilt that
forced him to it. It was bad on both sides, but the revenge was not so
wicked as the treason; for it was a voluntary act of theirs, and a
compelled one of his. The short on't is, he took a violent course to
cut up the Covenant by the roots; and there is your quarrel to him.

Now for a long-winded panegyric of the king of Navarre; and here I am
sure they are in earnest, when they take such overpains to prove there
is no likeness where they say I intended it. The hero, at whom their
malice is levelled, does but laugh at it, I believe; and, amongst the
other virtues of that predecessor, wants neither his justice nor his
clemency, to forgive all the heads of the League, as fast as