cannot spare a minute to hear my defence. So, in a plot-discovering age, I have often known an innocent man seized and imprisoned, and forced to he several months in chains, while the ministers were not at leisure to hear his petition, until they had prosecuted and hanged the number they proposed.
All I can reasonably hope for by this letter, is to convince my friends, and others who are pleased to wish me well, that I have neither been so ill a subject, nor so stupid an author, as I have been represented by the virulence of libellers: whose malice has taken the same train in both, by fathering dangerous principles in government upon me, which I never maintained, and insipid productions which I am not capable of writing. For, however I may have been soured by personal ill treatment, or by melancholy prospects for the publick, I am too much a politician to expose my own safety by offensive words. And if my genius and spirit be sunk by increasing years, I have at least discretion enough left, not to mistake the measure of my own abilities, by attempting subjects where those talents are necessary, which perhaps I may have lost with my youth.
JAN. 12, 1723.
I FIND a rebuke in a late letter of yours that both stings and pleases me extremely. Your saying that I ought to have writ a postscript to my friend Gay's, makes me not content to write less than a whole
letter;
