I begin already to be tired with drawing after their deformities, as a painter would be, who had nothing before him in his table but lazars, cripples, and hideous faces, which he was obliged to represent: yet I must not omit some few of their most notorious copyings. Take for example their Council of Six, which was an imitation of the League, who set up their famous council, commonly called “Of the Sixteen:” And take notice, that on both sides they picked out the most heady and violent men of the whole party; nay, they considered not so much as their natural parts, but heavy blockheads were thrown in for lumber, to make up the weight. Their zeal for the party, and their ambition, atoned for their want of judgment, especially if they were thought to have any interest in the people. Loud roarers of _aye_ and _no_ in the parliament, without common sense in ordinary discourses, if they were favourites of the multitude, were made privy counsellors of their cabal; and fools, who only wanted a parti-coloured coat, a cap, and a bawble, to pass for such amongst reasonable men, were to redress the imaginary grievances of a nation, by murdering, or at least seizing of the king. Men of scandalous lives, cheats, and murderers, were to reform the nation, and propagate the Protestant religion; and the rich ideots to hazard their estates and expectations, to forsake their ease, honour, and preferments, for an empty name of heading a party; the wittiest man amongst them to encumber and vex his decrepit age, for a silly pique of revenge, and to maintain his character to the last, of never being satisfied with any government, in which he was not more a king than the present master. To give the last stroke to this resemblance, fortune did her part; and the same fate, of division amongst themselves, ruined both those councils which were contriving their king’s destruction. The Duke of Mayenne and his adherents, who were much the most honest of the Leaguers, were not only for a king, but for a king of the royal line, in case that duke could not cause the election to fall on himself, which was impossible, because he was already married. The rest were, some for this man, some for another, and all in a lump for the daughter of Spain; this disunited them, and in the end ruined their conspiracy. In our Council of Six, some were for murdering, and some for securing of the king; some for a rising in the west, and some for an insurrection of the Brisk Boys of Wapping: in short, some were for a mongrel kind of kingship, to the exclusion of the royal line, but the greater part for a bare-faced commonwealth. This raised a division in their council; that division was fomented into a mutual hatred of each other; and the conclusion was, that instead of one conspiracy, the machines played double, and produced two, which were carried on at the same time. A kind of spread eagle plot was hatched, with two heads growing out of the same body: such twin treasons are apt