THE BOOK WAS DRENCHED - OUDL Home

THE FIRST DEFENCE 17
learned: "Of a parricide committed in Holland in the person
of Aristarchus by the abominable barbarism of Salmasius":
to wit, that you, a great critic, hired forsooth, at a king's expense
to write a king's defence, did with a sickening ex-
5 ordium, most like the trumpery doleful wailings of hired
mourner-women, not only fail to move with pity the mind
of any but a fool, but by die end of your first sentence instantly
provoke, in those who had scarce read it, laughter at your
manifold barbarisms. For, pray what is "parricidium in per-
10 sona regis admittere"? What is "in persona regis"? What
Latinity ever used such diction ?—as it were a murder committed
in the mask or disguise of a king! Unless maybe
you are telling us of some sham Philip—some Perkin Warbeck—who
by impersonating a king did in a way perpetrate
15 parricide in England. This word, methinks, you have spoken
better than you knew. For a tyrant is no real king; he is but a
player-king, the mere mask and spectre of a king. At all
events, for such Frenchified Latin blunders as this, with
which you abound, you shall be punished not by me, for I
20 have no time, but by your own fellow-grammarians; to them
I turn you over to be laughed and flogged out of court—and
much good may it do them.
Far more heinous is it, that what was decreed by our
supreme magistracy to be done to the king should be said by
25 you to have been done "by an execrable conspiracy of sacrilegious
men." Rogue, is it thus you name the acts and decrees
of our late most potent realm and present yet more potent
commonwealth, concerning whose deeds no king, even,