"However, once on a time a great wit set upon this task [ridiculing a love of publick liberty]; he undertook to laugh at this very virtue, and that so successfully, that he set the whole nation a laughing with him. What mighty engine, you will ask, was employed to put in motion so large a body, and for so extraordinary a cause? In truth, a very simple one: a discourse, of which all the wit consists in the title; and that too skulking, as you will see, under one unlucky word. Mrs. Bull's vindtcation of the indispensable duty of cuckoldom, incumbent upon wives, in case of the tyranny, infidelity, or insufficiency of husbands[1]. Now had the merry reader been but so wise as to reflect, that reason was the test of ridicule, and not ridicule the test of truth, he would have seen to rectify the proposition, and to state it fairly thus; The indispensable duty of divorce, &c. And then the joke had been over, before the laugh could have begun."
Another author however, who is allowed by the bishop to be no ill judge of the province of ridicule, speaks of the former work in somewhat more moderate terms:
"There is not perhaps in any language a bolder or stronger ridicule, than the well known apologue of the Tale of a Tub. Its manifest design is to recommend the English church, and to disgrace the two extremes of popery and puritanism[2]. Now if
- ↑ History of John Bull, part i, chap. 13.
- ↑ "Some indeed have pretended otherwise. — The pious author of the Independent Whig affirms [with the above author of the Critical Enquiry ] that it was an open attack upon
