I will not justify any of my own errors; I am sensible of many, and if Mr. Collier has by any accident stumbled on one or two, I will freely give them up to him, nullum unquam ingenium placuit sine venia. But I hope I have done nothing that can deprive me of the benefit of my clergy; and though Mr. Collier himself were the ordinary, I may hope to be acquitted.

My intention, therefore, is to do little else but to restore those passages to their primitive station which have suffered so much in being transplanted by him. I will remove 'em from his dunghill and replant 'em in the field of nature; and when I have washed 'em of that filth which they have contracted in passing through his very dirty hands, let their own innocence protect them.

Mr. Collier, in the high vigor of his obscenity, first commits a rape upon my words, and then arraigns 'em of immodesty; he has barbarity enough to accuse the very virgins that he has deflowered, and to make sure of their condemnation he has himself made 'em guilty. But he forgets that while he publishes their shame he divulges his own.

His artifice to make words guilty of profaneness is of the same nature; for where the expression is unblameable in its own clear and. genuine signification, he enters into it himself like the evil spirit; he possesses the innocent phrase and makes it bellow forth his own blasphemies; so that one would think the muse was legion.

To reprimand him a little in his own words, if these passages produced by Mr. Collier are obscene and profane, why were they raked in and disturbed unless it were to conjure up vice and revive impurities? Indeed Mr. Collier has a very untoward way with him; his pen has such a libertine stroke that 'tis a question whether the practice or the reproof be the more licentious.


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