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having decreed you sole arbiter of the productions of human wit in
this polite and most accomplished age. Methinks the number of
appellants were enough to shock and startle any judge of a genius
less unlimited than yours; but in order to prevent such glorious
trials, the person, it seems, to whose care the education of your
Highness is committed, has resolved, as I am told, to keep you in
almost an universal ignorance of our studies, which it is your
inherent birthright to inspect.
It is amazing to me that this person should have assurance, in the
face of the sun, to go about persuading your Highness that our age
is almost wholly illiterate and has hardly produced one writer upon
any subject. I know very well that when your Highness shall come to
riper years, and have gone through the learning of antiquity, you
will be too curious to neglect inquiring into the authors of the
very age before you; and to think that this insolent, in the account
he is preparing for your view, designs to reduce them to a number so
insignificant as I am ashamed to mention; it moves my zeal and my
spleen for the honour and interest of our vast flourishing body, as
well as of myself, for whom I know by long experience he has
professed, and still continues, a peculiar malice.
It is not unlikely that, when your Highness will one day peruse what
I am now writing, you may be ready to expostulate with your governor
upon the credit of what I here affirm, and command him to show you
some of our productions. To which he will answer--for I am well
informed of his designs--by asking your Highness where they are, and
what is become of them? and pretend it a demonstration that there
never were any, because they are not then to be found. Not to be
found! Who has mislaid them? Are they sunk in the abyss of things?
It is certain that in their own nature they were light enough to
swim upon the surface for all eternity; therefore, the fault is in
him who tied weights so heavy to their heels as to depress them to
the centre. Is their very essence destroyed? Who has annihilated
them? Were they drowned by purges or martyred by pipes? Who
administered them to the posteriors of -------. But that it may no
longer be a doubt with your Highness who is to be the author of this
universal ruin, I beseech you to observe that large and terrible
scythe which your governor affects to bear continually about him.
Be pleased to remark the length and strength, the sharpness and
hardness, of his nails and teeth; consider his baneful, abominable
breath, enemy to life and matter, infectious and corrupting, and
then reflect whether it be possible for any mortal ink and paper of
this generation to make a suitable resistance. Oh, that your
Highness would one day resolve to disarm this usurping maitre de
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