though your highness is hardly got clear of infancy, yet has the universal learned world already resolved upon appealing to your future dictates, with the lowest and most resigned submission; fate having decreed you sole arbiter of the productions of human wit, in this polite and most accomplished age. Methinks, the number of appellants were enough to shock and startle any judge, of a genius less[1] unlimited than yours: but, in order to prevent such glorious trials, the person, it seems, to whose care the education of your highness is committed, has resolved (as I am told) to keep you in almost a universal ignorance of our studies, which it is your inherent birthright to inspect.
It is amazing to me, that this person should have the assurance, in the face of the sun, to go about persuading your highness, that our age is almost wholly illiterate, and has hardly produced one writer upon any subject. I know very well, that when your highness shall[2] come to riper years, and have gone through the learning of antiquity, you will be too curious, to neglect inquiring into the authors of the very age before you: and to think that this insolent, in the account he is preparing for your view, designs to reduce them to a number so insignificant as I am ashamed to mention; it moves my zeal and my spleen for the honour and interest of our
- ↑ There is a solecism in this expression of less unlimited what is boundless can admit of no degrees. It should be less extensive.
- ↑ This is ungrammatical: it ought to have been written, 'Shall have come to riper years, and gone through,' &c. 'Or, shall come to riper years, and shall have gone through,' &c.
vast
