The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift/Volume 16/Observations on Heylin's History of the Presbyterians
THIS book, by some errours and neglects in the style, seems not to have received the author's last correction. It is written with some vehemence, very pardonable in one who had been an observer and a sufferer, in England, under that diabolical fanatick sect, which then destroyed church and state. But by comparing, in my memory, what I have read in other histories, he neither aggravates nor falsifies any facts. His partiality appears chiefly in setting the actions of Calvinists in the strongest light, without equally dwelling on those of the other side; which, however, to say the truth, was not his proper business. And yet he might have spent some more words on the inhuman massacre of Paris, and other parts of France, which no provocation (and yet the king had the greatest possible) could excuse, or much extenuate. The author, according to the current opinion of the age he lived in, had too high notions of regal power; led by the common mistake of the term Supreme Magistrate, and not rightly distinguishing between the legislature and administration: into which mistake the clergy fell or continued, in the reign of Charles II, as I have shown and explained in a treatise, &c.
March 6, 1727-8.