and trite, and very often fake. His Secret History is generally made up of coffeehouse scandals, or at best from reports at the third, fourth, or fifth hand. The account of the pretender's birth, would only become an old woman in a chimney-corner. His vanity runs intolerably through the whole book, affecting to have been of consequence at nineteen years old, and while he was a little Scotch parson of 40 pounds a year. He was a gentleman born, and in the time of his youth and vigour, drew in an old maiden daughter of a Scotch earl to marry him. His characters are miserably wrought, in many things mistaken, and all of them detracting[1], except of those who were friends to the presbyterians. That early love of liberty he boasts of, is absolutely false; for the first book that I believe he ever published, is an entire treatise in favour of passive obedience and absolute power; so that his reflections on the clergy, for asserting, and then changing those principles, come very improperly from him. He is the most partial of all writers that ever pretended so much to impartiality; and yet I, who knew him well, am convinced that he is as impartial as he could possibly find in his heart; I am
- ↑ Many of which were stricken through with his own hand, but left legible in the MS.; which he ordered in his last will, "his executor to print faithfally, as he left it, without adding, suppressing, or altering it in any particular." In the second volume, judge Burnet, the bishop's son and executor, promises that "the original manuscript of both volumes shall be deposited in the Cotton Library." But this promise does not appear to have been fulfilled; at least it certainly was not in 1736, when Two Letters were printed, addressed to Thomas Burnet, esq. In p. 8 of the second letter, the writer asserted, that he had in his own possession "an authentick and complete collection of the castrated passages."
