som, and presenting it to her.

The Martinists were better counteracted by the Wits, in some
extraordinary effusions, prodigal of humour and invective Wit and
raillery were happily exercised against these masked divines: for the
gaiety of the Wits was not foreign to their feelings. The Mar-Prelates
showed merry faces, but it was with a sardonic grin they had swallowed
the convulsing herb; they horridly laughed against their will--at
bottom all was gloom and despair. The extraordinary style of their
pamphlets, concocted in the basest language of the populace, might
have originated less from design than from the impotence of the
writers. Grave and learned persons have often found to their cost that
wit and humour must spring from the soil; no art of man can plant them
there. With such, this play and grace of the intellect can never be
the movements of their nature, but its convulsions.

Father Martin and his two sons received "A sound boxe of the eare," in
"a pistle" to "the father and the two sonnes, Huffe, Ruffe, and
Snuffe, the three tame ruffians of the Church, who take pepper in the
nose because they cannot marre prelates grating," when they once met
with an adversary who openly declared--

"I profess rayling, and think it is as good a cudgel for a Martin as a
stone for a dogge, or a whip for an ape, or poison for a rat. Who
would curry an ass with an ivory comb? Give this beast thistles for
provender. I doe but yet angle with a silken flie, to see whether
Martins will nibble; and if I see that, why then I have wormes for the
nonce, and will give them line enough, like a trowte, till they
swallow both hooke and line, and then, Martin, beware your gills, for
I'll make you daunce at the pole's end."

"Fill thy answer as full of lies as of lines, swell like a toade, hiss
like an adder, bite like a dog, and chatter like a monkey, my pen is
prepared, and my mind; and if you chaunce to find anie worse words
than you broughte, let them be put in your dad's dictionarie.
Farewell, and be hanged; and I pray God you fare no worse.--Yours at
an hour's warning."

This was the proper way to reply to such writers, by driving them out
of the field with their own implements of warfare. "Pasquill of
England"[418] admirably observed of the papers of this faction--"Doubt
not but that the same reckoning in the ende will be made of you which
your favourers commonly make of their old shooes--when they are past
wearing, they barter th