Part 2 — Marcellinus to Mons. Boileau.

NAY, this is beyond the possibility of patience! and tho’ there is much due to the character of princes, yet there is more to ourselves and truth; and I cannot without the highest injustice and ingratitude possible, but remind you of some of the actions of your idol monarch, which with so much reason dispute with each other, which was the most enormous and tyrannical. I only endeavour’d to make Julian the apostate, pass upon posterity for a hero, and you call me an insolent brazen-fac’d rascally flatterer. If I exceeded the exactness of an historian, it was because in that treatise I set up for a courtier, and sincerity in such people is of the most dangerous consequence imaginable. If the emperor Julian had been the first monster in nature, that met with a willing pen to set his actions in a less inglorious light than others expected, and naked truth required; yet I am sure he is not the greatest. Your master has trac’d all the footsteps of his cruelty and policy; for if he manag’d matters so swimmingly between the catholicks and Arrians, that he secur’d himself by their divisions, Loüis has all along done the same: if he countenanced the Jews, Loüis supported the Turks, if he destroyed the christians, Loüis had done it in a much more barbarous and perfidious manner. If he threw down the images of Christ at Cæsarea Philippi, Loüis has acted the same in the front of the jesuits[55] Church: now since you have dar’d to consecrate the reputation of your king, why so many bitter invectives against me a petty Pagan, for speaking in favour of my master? you modern wits, that value your selves so much upon the having refin’d our dross, have sunk as scandalously low in matters of flattery as any of us. We are continually pestered here with disputes; and every court rings with the different claims. The popes send legates hither for their saints, Pluto won’t let one of them go, because they are damned. Others will have it that their time is fulfilled in Purgatory, therefore would be discharged: but the Devil knows better things, Father Garnet too, that execrable engine of the Powder-Plot storms and raves, but the horned gentlemen with cloven feet laugh at him, and his canonization. Where was there ever so much innocent christian blood shed as on Bartholomew’s day at Paris? and yet even that unparalleled murder has been justified a thousand times by your church; as if the accurateness of a man’s pen could make that pass for a virtue which will be an everlasting and detestable blot. Pelisson is a man of prodigious parts, Boileau the smoothest pen and noblest genius of his time, because their prince is alive, and equally generous to reward their flattery, as greedy to have it: but poor I, because I have been dead one thousand four hundred years, and better, I am an idle rascally fellow. But even at this distance I am no stranger to the transactions of Versailles; and since you have spit out so much of your blackest venom against me and my hero, I shall take the freedom to call to mind some of those very remarkable particulars which give so glorious a lustre, as you call it, to your viro immortali. His life has been one continued series of rapines and murders, perjuries and desolations. For tho’ the first disorders in Hungary, were in some measure owing to the injustices count Teckeley received from the ministers of the empire, yet it is undeniably true, that France fomented the war, and sollicited the Turk to espouse Teckeley’s quarrels, and promised to assist him himself. The negotiations of the French ambassadors at the Port, the vast sums of money remitted to Teckeley, and the endeavours to disengage the king of Poland and the duke of Bavaria from the interest of the empire; these things, Mons. Boileau, were not managed with so much secrecy, but the more essential particulars are come to many peoples knowledge. His other underhand dealings with several princes and cities of Germany, shewed his formidable army in Alsatia was not to succour the empire, but to seize on it. But the raising the siege at Vienna broke all their measures at Versailles, and the king of France, confounded at his disappointment, vented his rage upon his own subjects, and that part of them too that set the crown upon his head, when the most considerable of the Roman Catholicks abandon’d his interest. The ravage he committed in the territories of the three ecclesiastical electors, and in the Palatinate at the same time, shewed him rather the scourge of mankind, than the eldest son of the church.

’Tis true, there never was any prince but had his flatterers: but you French have been guilty of the grossest to the present king of France, that ever were recorded. My Julian would have blush’d, or rather trembled, at such blasphemous adulation. Loüis has been adored for his mercy, and yet exceeded our Nero in barbarity and bloodshed. Fire and sword were mild executioners of his cruelty; for his impetuous lust of mischief has been so fruitful in inventing torments, that he has made all those forms of death desirable to his subjects that were the reproach of tyrants: his ingenious malice has contrived exquisite pain, without destroying the persons that suffer it; and if he could compel man to be immortal, he would vie miseries with hell itself. He scorns all the humble paths of Domitian’s perfidiousness: such puny perjuries are too mean for Loüis le Grand: And since he could not possibly make them greater in their nature, he aggravated them by their number. The peace of the Pyreneans, that of Aix la Chapelle, that of Nimeguen, the truce for twenty years, the edict of Nants, the treaty at Reswick, are sufficient arguments, that he only promised that he might not perform; and vow’d to observe treaties that he might have the lechery of breaking them afterwards with a more execrable guilt. Your servile flattery stiles him the restorer and preserver of the peace of Christendom, yet he arm’d the Crescent against the Cross, and carried desolation through every corner of Europe. There is no prince but he has invaded, no neighbour that he has not oppress’d, no law that he has not violated, no religion that he has not trampled on, and shewed the successors of St. Peter, that he had one sword sharper than both theirs. His panegyrists have refined the impious wit of Commodus’s sycophants; and lest books should not transmit their blasphemies low enough to posterity, they have raised superb monuments of his arrogancy and their own shame. What statues, what pictures of him at Versailles, Fountainbleau, Marly, the Louvre, the Invalides, Paris gates, the Palace Royal, &c. Where have I, Mons. Boileau, arm’d my Julian with a [56] thunderbolt? have I any thing equal to your viro immortali, to your divo Ludivico? Why then am I such an infamous flatterer, such a sneaking cringing rascal? I have nothing comparable to your fustian bombast, nor to the hyperboles of Pelisson, nor the impertinent titles of every Frenchman that sets pen to paper. I leave the world to judge, if my hero has not a juster claim to all the eulogies I have given him, ten thousand times preferable to Loüis le Grand, and yet you have said ten thousand times more of him.

POSTSCRIPT.

Just as I was dispatching this, a mail came in from Spain, that gave us an account of the king of France’s having extended his dominions over the plate-fleet; but whilst he was drinking Chateau-Renault’s health, some two or three merry English boys run away with it all; which has given Loüis and his grandson such a fit of the cholick, that they are not expected to live long under such terrible agonies: whereupon the Devil has order’d a thousand chaldron of fresh brimstone to air their apartments against they should come.