merit; let him not encourage villainy by preferments, the proper dowry of virtue; nor impoverish the publick, to make one man unmeasurably rich. Let there be a man (the dictates both of religion and reason allow it) who is the prince's confident, and on whom he may, like the sun, more peculiarly dart down his beams; but let there not be any who day and night besiegeth the king, who by a violent usurpation (the most abhorrable monopoly in nature) appropriates him to himself; for he who impales a good, which ought to belong to the publick, attempts the same injustice as if he hid the sun from all the world.

There is nothing that recommends a prince's judgment, or that is of more importance to his safety, than a discreet choice of his ministers. A man cannot conduct a boat, nor guide a chariot, nor manage an horse, without making use of address and method; and shall those who are to direct mankind, jump into the employ without any preparatory discipline? We come to the knowledge of affairs, and the dexterity of ordering them, by experience and reason. A place does not presently make a man wiser than he was before; nor are we to expect revelations, nor think heaven obliged to endow a prince's ministers with the spirit of well governing, and render his precipitate election valid and successful by a sudden illumination. Courtiers are the matter, and the prince is the artist, who can easily render this matter fairer, but not better than it is; he can add to it colours and shape on the outside, but cannot give it any interior goodness. He can bestow the office and the title, but he cannot confer qualifications: the knowledge of things past, the penetration into things to come: that light which disembroils the intrigues of the court, the science of making war, and the dexterity of treating peace. In a word, he may make an idol, but he can neither make a spirit of it, nor an able man.

Yet even in Christendom such idols are to be seen; there have been always unworthy persons happy; monkies caressed in kings cabinets, and apparelled in cloth of gold; there often happens an authority which is blind and dumb, which neither knows nor understands, which appears only and dazzles, pure refined authority you may call it, for it has not any mixture of virtue or reason. There are grandees, who are only re markable by their greatness, and their greatness is all without them; they resemble certain fruitless mountains in some parts of the world, which produce neither herb nor plant; they seem to touch heaven with their stately tops, yet serve the earth for no use, and therefore their sterility makes their height accursed.

Princes therefore should make a strict inquiry into the abilities and virtues of those they employ; they should not suffer themselves to be led by occasion, but take for their instruments such as are able, not such as stand next, or first offer themselves; wherein too, they should regard not only a general sufficiency, but a particular fitness for discharging those charges in which they place them; they must not think an expert soldier, that hath signalised himself in divers battles, is therefore qualified to be sent on an ambassy; nor make an old prodigal lord treasurer, and submit the exchequer to his dispose, because, having in his youth profused away all his own estate, he now speaks admirably well of frugality. Nor should a prince presently thrust into his council all those whose

conversation is grateful to him. We ought to make a difference betwixt persons who delight us, and those who are profitable to us; betwixt the recreations of the mind, and the necessities of the state; and, if a sovereign take not special care in this examen, he will commit irreme. diable errors, and such whereby he may render not only his own reign miserable, but also his memory accursed and reproached in ages to come. He therefore ought not to follow his own private affections or inclinations, but abandon all capricio's and fancies in this matter. Let him in other things sport and divert himself as he pleaseth, but, in a choice of so high concernment, he must use the severity of his judgment, and at first bring with him an indifferency of will; it ought to be a pure operation of reason, freed and dispoiled of love or hate.

For the mischiefs, arising from ill ministers, are no less fatal, than various; part of which we have already recounted, and to sum them up all is almost as difficult, as to prevent them. If they are ignorant, they ruin the state, their master, and themselves, by their weakness; if they are false and treacherous, they set the publick to sale, and betray its interest for money. If they are men of ill principles, they blow up their prince to vanity by flatteries, and banish truth from the palace. They put him upon extravagant designs, or endeavour to drown him in voluptuousness; they exhaust the royal treasury by their profuseness, and strip poor people to the very skin, to feed their insatiable avarice; they rob the prince of his noblest and most stable throne, the hearts of his subjects, by creating fears and mutual jealousies between them; and whilst, in vain pretences and endeavours, no less impracticable, than unjust, they would seem to make him more absolute than his forefathers, they render him less considerable at home, and consequently less re vered abroad, than any of his ancestors; they manage affairs according to private fancies and hate publick councils; having committed extravagances that render them liable to justice, the rest of their life is spent, not to serve their master, but to save their own necks; so that in all their following councils they consult not his advantage, but their own defence, and make his interests stoop to their conveniences; what care they how much the people be provoked? They had rather their country should be involved in all the miseries and desolations of a civil war, or be made a prey to a foreign invader, than they themselves brought to an account before an impartial tribunal; since, in the first case, they hope to shift amongst the croud; but, in the second, can expect nothing but certain ruin, for their conscious fears presage what will happen; they know well enough the ills they have done must be defended with greater, and, if the law live, they must die. Wherefore, these being their courses, and that the plague causes not so great a desolation, as one of these accursed favourites, it might be wished, that this prayer might be added to all the publick litanies of Christians, Lord turn away from all states an evil, which is the cause of so many other evils: deny not sovereign princes the spirit of conduct, which is fit for them to govern by: give them understanding enough to counsel themselves well, and to chuse their counsellors as they ought.'

To conclude, as the first advances of ill court-favourites are com. monly base and shameful, their progress vile, wicked, and destructive,

their short continuances attended with hazards and anxieties, so their eclipses are ever more fatal, and their falls desperate; they are generally surprised with ruin, and their defeat is like that of forlorn troops, cut in pieces before they can rally, or be reinforced. Private men oftentimes fall upon their legs, and find friends to relieve, at least to commiserate them, and bankrupt merchants are daily seen to rise again like phoenixes out of their own dust; but with courtiers and statesmen there are no degrees of misfortune; those ladders they clambered up with so much sweat, address, and difficulty, upon the smallest misstep, serve but to render their precipitation more notorious. When they are burled down from all those bubbled glories, their best comfort is not to survive their destiny; and their greatest misery is, when they outlive themselves, to see their families buried in their ruins, and all the advantages of their honour and fortune turned against them, like an army dissipated with the fury of its own cannon. Then, too late, they find themselves forsaken of all those alliances, which they had with so much subtlety contracted, vainly imagining to have laid a foundation of everlasting greatness: their cobweb policies are unravelled in a moment, for no sooner do they begin to decline, but their most obliged creatures shun them most, and, like Haman's wife, are the first harbingers of their ruin. Those that were raised by their countenance, not daring to own any love or honour to their persons, lest they should be involved in their ruin, by being at least suspected, as concerned in their crimes; their own servants conclude it but justice, as well as prudence, to expose their faults; their enemies triumph over them, and even their friends think it charity enough to afford them an insulting pity, and the people, who with reason universally hated, but feared them before, are now privileged to curse them; nay, the prince himself, in whose service perhaps they wounded their consciences, and for whose pleasures they bleed, uses them but as the skreen of envy, and hoping with their ruin to gratify many, and please all, gives them up, when he cannot in prudence longer support them, as a propitiatory sacrifice to the enraged multitude, and becomes as inexhorable to their petitions, as they had been formerly to the more just requests of others in distress.

In fine, having long since forfeited their innocency (the sweet retreat of oppressed virtue) they at last find no sanctuary sufficient to protect them, but are precipitated out of the world, loaded with guilt and shame, and the ruins of nations, and the destruction of their masters, and the execrations of all mankind.

THOMAS (LORD, ALIAS COLONEL) PRIDE;*

BEING TOUCHED IN CONSCIENCE

FOR HIS INHUMAN MURDER OF THE BEARS IN THE BEAR-GARDEN,

WHEN HE WAS HIGH-SHERIFF OF SURREY.

TAKEN IN SHORT-HAND, BY T. S.

LATE CLERK TO HIS LORDSHIP'S BREW-HOUSE.

London, printed for C. W. 1680. Quarto, containing twelve pages.

MY GOOD FRIENDS AND NEIGHBOURS,

You

VOU are come (I thank you) to see me die, and let me request you to take my last breath; I'll make no set speech; the long-parliament loaded you with those (so many speeches, as, if orderly burnt, would brew two-hundred quarters of malt) and had sat speaking still, if his late highness had not bid me unhouse them. I spake none, neither in the commons, nor in the other house; and yet I must either now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold my peace.

My conscience! it is my conscience speaks; and the first thing that is upon my spirits, is the killing of the bears; for which the people bait me, and call me all the names in the rain-bow. But, did not David kill a bear? Did not the lord-deputy Ireton kill a bear? Did not another lord of ours kill five bears, and five fidlers? May bears be killed in Nottingham, in Leicester, and not in Surrey? You know I was high-sheriff of the county, and, if I might not kill a few bears, why was I made sheriff? I thought it our interest to let nothing live that would fight; and, therefore, we made an act against cock-matches. Others have killed far greater things with less commission. But, perhaps they will say, I struck at the prerogative; for kings and protectors have a privilege, when they find a good mastive-dog, to clap their collar upon him, and use him for the game; and so, if kill the bears, hang the dogs; no bear, no dog. But think you the prerogative would reach to bears? Or that Great Britain were the isle of dogs? Are we, like St. Mallows, guarded by mastives? The French have ever made us

Was originally a drayman, or brewer's servant; but by the faction in the great rebellion, being advanced to the degree of a parliament-man, was at last thought a proper instrument to sit as a judge against his majesty K. Charles the First.

their apes, and must we follow their dogs too? If an English mastive get whelps in France, they all prove curs: (I wish our English soldiers there may never turn French.)

Can we forget that horrid accident, when major-general Skippon came in a horse-litter wounded to London? When he passed by the brew-house near St. John's-street, a devilish mastive flew (as at a bear) at one of his horses, and held him so fast by the stones, that the horse grew mad as a mad dog: the soldiers so amazed, that none had the wit to shoot the mastive; but the horse-litter, borne between two horses, tossed the major-general like a dog in a blanket. Thus your dogs use horse and man. And for women, remember how Swash, the abominable mastive, took a dispensation with an elder's maid. Nay, not a sow in the streets, by night, but the watchmen's dogs steal privately to her; which makes your London pigs have such round heads. And when I myself had my first brew-house (which was at Pye-corner) I heard a pig bark, whereby I knew it was a city pig.

Here is a sweet stir with bears and dogs, able to make a wise man mad: For, first, they pretend to preserve their dogs, yet rail at me for shooting the bears that kill those dogs; and then tax me for killing the bears, yet set their dogs to tear the bears in pieces: Yes, and the man, that owned the bears, now sues me for destroying his goods.

But what the devil are bears good for? They brag of a weaponsalve, made, forsooth, of the fat of bears killed in the act of genera tion (though bears never generate but by night, when none can know it:) My sword hath made some wounds, let them anoint the blade of my sword, and try how many cavaliers it will cure. The devil has a

hand or a foot in this salve, if it comes from bears: For you know, the beast with seven heads, and ten horns, had the foot of a bear; whence people say, a bear has the devil's foot. You think I mean the bear at the bridge-foot (for God sends meat, and the devil sends cooks ;) I mean, a limb of the devil: And is it a sin to destroy the devil? George was sainted for killing a dragon (saints of old, like honest George, used to kill beasts, but now saints commonly kill men ;) the dragon and bear are the pictures of the same; for the devil hath divers sutes to put on: He wears not only the beast (a red dragon, an otter, a bear) but a very man, a woman, in silks, in buff, in a long mourning-cloke, to hide his cloven foot, and too often a saint or angel of new light; yet then so like as one devil to another.

An author of ours said, the beast's ten horns are the kings of Europe; which may be the reason why the members, that voted against the king, were so hot for decimation: Those members were not the major part, but the major-general part. I confess, that author wrote after the king was beheaded, when our liberties stood committed to several keepers : and yet I would know that member's name, that would not be a king: Every creature, above and below, hath a monarch in his belly. The devil would fain have been king of heaven, and Adam scorned not to be king of the earth; and each of his sons would be king of all the rest. And, to speak my conscience, if the state should vouchsafe to name me king, I think I should not question the election; no, though it were, as I hear the Persians once chose a king, by the neighing