PART III. CANTO II.
ARGUMENT.
The Saints engage in fierce contests
About their carnal interests,
To share their sacrilegious preys
According to their rates of grace;
Their various frenzies to reform,
When Cromwell left them in a storm;
Till, in th' effige of Rumps, the rabble
Burn all their grandees of the cabal.
The two last conversations have unfolded the views of the confederate sects, and prepared the way for the business of the subsequent canto. Their differences will there be agitated by characters of higher consequence; and their mutual reproaches will again enable the poet to expose the knavery and hypocrisy of each. This was the principal intent of the work. The fable was considered by him only as the vehicle of his satire. And perhaps when he published the First Part, he had no more determined what was to follow in the Second, than Tristram Shandy had on a like occasion. The fable itself, the bare outlines of which I conceive to be borrowed, mutatis mutandis, from Cervantes, seems here to be brought to a period. The next canto has the form of an episode. The last consists chiefly of two dialogues and two letters. Neither Knight nor Squire has any further adventures. Nash.
