Ratts Rhimed to Death/To the Reader
To the
Reader.
Reader,
This Collection of excellent Ballads on the late Rump, who called themselves the Parliament, when they were formerly Printed in loose sheets, might not unfitly be called the Picture of the Members of the Rump dissolved, and stinking singly a-part. Being now bound together, they may as fitly be called the Picture of the said Rump assembled, and stinking in Consort. If you think this second Edition might be spared, I must borrow my Apology from their Sermons, who were Preachers to the Rump; which, for the most part, were nothing but Repetition and Tautology, or a Rump of staler Mutton hash’d by ill looks, where all the parts being minced exceeding small, lost their order and distinction. And where that which was the Preface would as well have served for the Conclusion, and both the Preface and Conclusion would equally have past for the Middle of the dry Discourse. If you ask me, Why being dead and rotten, the unsavoury remembrance of them is preserved by these Papers: It is, because whilst they lived, they were a kind of Purrezes, whose business was to suck the blood of the Nation, and to break our sleeps by stinging; and who never stink more than when they are crusht, and squeezed; and who, in spight of all perfumes, will offend the Nose even when they are dead. I hope you will pardon the ill Tunes to which they are to be sung, there being none bad enough for them; nor any voice so fit as their Speaker’s, who, as long as he was the Rump of this Rump, and sate in the Chair, it was a kind of a new Common-wealth, or Mr. Hobs’s Artificiall Man made a Leviathan, still breaking wind, and speaking backwards.