The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D. - Volume 07: Historical and Political Tracts-IrishSwift, Jonathan
General
The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D. - Volume 07: Historical and Political Tracts-Irish
Swift, Jonathan
Ireland -- Politics and government -- 18th century
Besides, as I take your intentions to be sincerely meant for the public
service, so your original method of entertaining and instructing us will
be more general and more useful in this season of the year, when people
are retired to amusements more cool, more innocent, and much more
reasonable than those they have left; when their passions are subsided
or suspended; when they have no occasions of inflaming themselves, or
each other; where they will have opportunities of hearing common sense,
every day in the week, from their tenants or neighbouring farmers, and
thereby be qualified, in hours of rain or leisure, to read and consider
the advice or information you shall send them.
Another weighty reason why you should not alter your manner of writing,
by dwindling to a newsmonger, is because there is no suspension of arms
agreed on between you and your adversaries, who fight with a sort of
weapons which have two wonderful qualities, that they are never to be
worn out, and are best wielded by the weakest hands, and which the
poverty of our language forceth me to call by the trite appellations of
scurrility, slander, and Billingsgate. I am far from thinking that these
gentlemen, or rather their employers, (for the operators themselves are
too obscure to be guessed at) should be answered after their own way,
although it were possible to drag them out of their obscurity; but I
wish you would enquire what real use such a conduct is to the cause they
have been so largely paid to defend. The author of the three first
Occasional Letters, a person altogether unknown, hath been thought to
glance (for what reasons he best knows) at some public proceedings, as
if they were not agreeable to his private opinions. In answer to this,
the pamphleteers retained on the other side are instructed by their
superiors, to single out an adversary whose abilities they have most
reason to apprehend, and to load himself, his family, and friends, with
all the infamy that a perpetual conversation in Bridewell, Newgate, and
the stews could furnish them; but, at the same time, so very unluckily,
that the most distinguishing parts of their characters strike directly
in the face of their benefactor, whose idea presenting itself along with
his guineas perpetually to their imagination, occasioned this desperate
blunder.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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