A diurnal-maker is the sub-almoner of history, Queen Mab's register, one whom, by the same figure that a north country pedlar is a merchantman, you may style an author. It is like overreach of language, when every thin tinder-cloaked quack must be called a doctor; when a clumsy cobbler usurps the attribute of our English peers, and is vamped a translator. List him a writer and you smother Geoffrey in swabber-slops; the very name of dabbler oversets him; he is swallowed up in the phrase, like Sir S.L. [Samuel Luke] in a great saddle, nothing to be seen but the giddy feather in his crown. They call him a Mercury, but he becomes the epithet like the little negro mounted upon an elephant, just such another blot rampant. He has not stuffings sufficient for the reproach of a scribbler, but it hangs about him like an old wife's skin when the flesh hath forsaken her, lank and loose. He defames a good title as well as most of our modern noblemen; those wens of greatness, the body politic's most peccant humours blistered into lords. He hath so raw-boned a being that however you render him he rubs it out and makes rags of the expression. The silly countryman who, seeing an ape in a scarlet coat, blessed his young worship, and gave his landlord joy of the hopes of his house, did not slander his complement with worse application than he that names this shred an historian. To call him an historian is to knight a mandrake; 'tis to view him through a perspective, and by that gross hyperbole to give the reputation of an engineer to a maker of mousetraps. Such an historian would hardly pass muster with a Scotch stationer in a sieveful of ballads and godly books. He would not serve for the breast-plate of a begging Grecian. The most cramped compendium that the age hath seen since all learning hath been almost torn into ends, outstrips him by the head. I have heard of puppets that could prattle in a play, but never saw of their writings before. There goes a report of the Holland women that together with their children they are delivered of a Sooterkin, not unlike to a rat, which some imagine to be the offspring of the stoves. I know not what _Ignis fatuus_ adulterates the press, but it seems much after that fashion, else how could this vermin think to be a twin to a legitimate writer; when those weekly fragments shall pass for history, let the poor man's box be entitled the exchequer, and the alms-basket a magazine. Not a worm that gnaws on the dull scalp of voluminous Holinshed, but at every meal devoured more chronicle than his tribe amounts to. A marginal note of W. P. would serve for a winding-sheet for that man's works, like thick-skinned fruits are all rind, fit for nothing but the author's fate, to be pared in a pillory.