"But he hath not used his patron Duke much better; for he hath put him under a most dismal and unfortunate character of a successor, excluded from the crown by act of state for his religion, who fought his way to the crown, changed his religion, and died by the hand of a Roman assassinate. "It is enough to make his great duke's courage quail, to find himself under such an unlucky and disastrous representation, and thus personated; besides, he hath offered a justification of an act of exclusion against a popish successor, in a Protestant kingdom, by remembering what was done against the king of Navarre. "The Popish religion, in France, did, _de facto,_ by act of state, exclude a Protestant prince, who is under no obligation, from his religion, to destroy his Popish subjects. "Though a Popish prince is, to destroy his Protestant subjects. "A Popish prince, to a Protestant kingdom, without more, must be the most insufferable tyrant, and exceed the character that any story can furnish for that sort of monster: And yet all the while to himself a religious and an applauded prince; discharged from the tortures that ordinarily tear and rend the hearts of the most cruel princes, and make them as uneasy to themselves as they are to their subjects, and sometimes prevail so far as to lay some restraints upon their wicked minds. "But this his patron will impute to his want of judgment; for this poet's heroes are commonly such monsters as Theseus and Hercules are, renowned throughout all ages for destroying. "But to excuse him, this man hath forsaken his post, and entered upon another province. To "The Observator"[2] it belongs to confound truth and falsehood; and, by his false colours and impostures, to put out the eyes of the people, and leave them without understanding. "But our poet hath not so much art left him as to frame any thing agreeable, or _verisimilar_, to amuse the people, or wherewith to deceive them. "His province is to corrupt the manners of the nation, and lay waste their morals; his understanding is clapt, and his brains are vitiated, and he is to rot the age. "His endeavours are more happily applied, to extinguish the little remains of the virtue of the age by bold impieties, and befooling religion by impious and inept rhymes, to confound virtue and vice, good and evil, and leave us without consciences. "And thus we are prepared for destruction. "But to give the world a taste of his atheism and impiety, I shall recite two of his verses, as recited upon the stage, viz. For conscience, and heaven's fear, religious rules, They are all state-bells to toll in pious fools;