Swift, in the sixth chapter of Gulliver’s account of Laputa, gives the captain’s report, as it was delivered to him by a distinguished Laputan professor, how to detect the difference between a man who intended to murder a king, and one who only designed to burn a metropolis. The captain explained to him the method taken in Tribnia (or Britain), in matters of high treason. ‘I told him that in the kingdom of Tribnia, by the natives called Langden, where I had sojourned some time in my travels, the bulk of the people consisted in a manner wholly of discoverers, witnesses, informers, accusers, prosecutors, evidencers, swearers, together with their several subservient instruments, all under the colours, the conduct, and the pay of ministers of state and their deputies. The plots in that kingdom are usually the workmanship of those persons who desire to raise their own characters of profound politicians; to restore new vigour to a crazy administration; to stifle, or divert general discontents; to fill their pockets with forfeitures, and raise or sink the opinion of public credit as either shall best answer their private advantage. It is first agreed and settled among them what suspected persons shall be accused of a plot; then effectual care is taken to secure all their letters and papers, and put the owners in chains. ◆[Sidenote: _DECYPHERING._]◆ These papers are delivered to a set of artists very dexterous in finding out the mysterious meanings of words, syllables, and letters; for instance, they can discover … a flock of geese to signify a senate; a lame dog, an invader; the plague, a standing army; a buzzard, the prime minister; the gout, a high priest; a gibbet, a secretary of state; … a sieve, a court lady; a broom, a revolution; a mouse-trap, an employment; a bottomless pit, a treasury; a sink, a court; a cap and bells, a favourite; a broken reed, a court of justice; an empty ton, a general; a running sore, the administration. When this method fails, they have two others more effectual, which the learned among them call crotchets and anagrams. First, they can decipher all initial letters into political meanings; thus N shall signify a plot; B, a regiment of horse; I, a fleet at sea; or, secondly, by transposing the letters of the alphabet in any suspected paper, they can lay open the deepest designs of a discontented party. So, for example, if I should say, ‘Our brother Tom has got the piles,’ a skilful decipherer would discover that the same letters which compose that sentence may be analysed into the following words:――“Resist――a plot――is brought home――the tour;” and that is the anagrammatic method.’ Under this rich satire there is a world of truth. But, as already said, the committee were not far wrong in interpreting at least some of the papers in cypher; and the legislature was not unjustified in bringing in separate Bills of Pains and Penalties against Plunkett, Kelly (Nonjuror, Jesuit, perhaps both), and Atterbury.