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your own virtues, and at the same time be very unwilling to offend
your modesty; but chiefly I should celebrate your liberality towards
men of great parts and small fortunes, and give you broad hints that
I mean myself. And I was just going on in the usual method to
peruse a hundred or two of dedications, and transcribe an abstract
to be applied to your Lordship, but I was diverted by a certain
accident. For upon the covers of these papers I casually observed
written in large letters the two following words, DETUR DIGNISSIMO,
which, for aught I knew, might contain some important meaning. But
it unluckily fell out that none of the Authors I employ understood
Latin (though I have them often in pay to translate out of that
language). I was therefore compelled to have recourse to the Curate
of our Parish, who Englished it thus, Let it be given to the
worthiest; and his comment was that the Author meant his work should
be dedicated to the sublimest genius of the age for wit, learning,
judgment, eloquence, and wisdom. I called at a poet's chamber (who
works for my shop) in an alley hard by, showed him the translation,
and desired his opinion who it was that the Author could mean. He
told me, after some consideration, that vanity was a thing he
abhorred, but by the description he thought himself to be the person
aimed at; and at the same time he very kindly offered his own
assistance gratis towards penning a dedication to himself. I
desired him, however, to give a second guess. Why then, said he, it
must be I, or my Lord Somers. From thence I went to several other
wits of my acquaintance, with no small hazard and weariness to my
person, from a prodigious number of dark winding stairs; but found
them all in the same story, both of your Lordship and themselves.
Now your Lordship is to understand that this proceeding was not of
my own invention; for I have somewhere heard it is a maxim that
those to whom everybody allows the second place have an undoubted
title to the first.
This infallibly convinced me that your Lordship was the person
intended by the Author. But being very unacquainted in the style
and form of dedications, I employed those wits aforesaid to furnish
me with hints and materials towards a panegyric upon your Lordship's
virtues.
In two days they brought me ten sheets of paper filled up on every
side. They swore to me that they had ransacked whatever could be
found in the characters of Socrates, Aristides, Epaminondas, Cato,
Tully, Atticus, and other hard names which I cannot now recollect.
However, I have reason to believe they imposed upon my ignorance,
because when I came to read over their collections, there was not a
syllable there but what I and everybody else knew as well as
themselves: therefore I grievously suspect a cheat; and that these
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