will be consenting. In fine, tho’ the soul be never so well fortify’d to hold out a siege, yet the body, as soon as love’s artillery begins to play upon it, it will soon beat a parley, and make a separate treaty for itself. Thus her _Punick_ majesty ran on, and the Lord knows when her royal clack would have done striking, if a female messenger had not come to her in the nick of time, and whisper’d her in the ear, to go to the famous _Lucretia_’s crying-out, who, it seems, was got with child upon a hay-cock, by _Æsop_ the fabulist. As soon as queen _Dido_ and her two prattling companions were gone out of the room, Mr. _Nokes_, says I, you have without question seen _Æsop_ very often, therefore pray let me beg the favour of you, to tell me whether he is such a deformed ill-favoured wight, as the historians represent him; for you must know we have a modern critick of singular humanity, near St. _James_’s, that has been pleased, in some late dissertation upon _Phalaris_’s epistles, to maintain that he was a well-shap’d, handsome gentleman; and for a proof of this, insists much upon _Æsop_’s intriguing with his fellow-slave, the beautiful _Rhodope_. No, no, replies Mr. _Nokes_, _Æsop_ is just such a crumpled hump-shoulder’d dog, for all the world, as you see him before _Ogilby_’s translation of his fables; and let the above-mentioned grammarian, I think they call him, Dr. _Bentivolio_, say what he will to the contrary, ’tis even so as I tell you. And now, we are upon the chapter of Dr. _Bentivolio_; about a month ago I happen’d to make merry over a bowl of punch with _Phalaris_ the _Sicilian_ tyrant, who swore by all that was good and sacred, that he would trounce the unmannerly slave for robbing him of those epistles, which have gone unquestion’d under his name for so many ages: but the time is coming, said he, when I shall make this impudent pedant cry _peccavi_ for the unworthy treatment he has given me: I have my brazen-bull, heaven be prais’d, ready for him, and as soon as he comes into these quarters, will shut him up in it, and roast him with his own dull volumes, and those of his dearly beloved friends the _Dutch_ commentators.