Treatises wrote by the same Author, most of them mentioned in the following Discourses; which will be speedily published. A Character of the present set of Wits in this Island. A Dissertation upon the principal Productions of Grub street. Lectures upon a Dissection of Human Nature. A Panegyric upon the World. An Analytical Discourse upon Zeal, Histori-theophysilogically considered. A general History of Ears. A modest Defence of the Proceedings of the Rabble in all Ages. A Description of the Kingdom of Absurdities. A Voyage into England, by a Person of Quality in Terra Australis incognita, translated from the Original. A Critical Essay upon the Art of Canting, Philosophically, Physically, and Musically considered. THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY. IF good and ill nature equally operated upon mankind, I might have saved myself the trouble of this Apology; for it is manifest by the reception the following discourse hath met with, that those who approve it, are a great majority among the men of taste: yet there have been two or three treatises written expressly against it, besides many others that have flirted at it occasionally, without one syllable having been ever published in its defence, or even quotation to its advantage, that I can remember, except by the polite author of a late discourse between a deist and a Socinian. Therefore, since the book seems calculated to live at least as long as our language, and our taste admit no great alterations, I am content to convey some apology along with it. The greatest part of that book was finished about thirteen years since, 1696, which is eight B years before it was published. The author was then young, his invention at the height, and his reading fresh in his head. By the assistance of some thinking, and much conversation, he had endeavoured to strip himself of as many real prejudices as he could; I say real ones, because under the notion of prejudices, he knew to what dangerous heights some men have proceeded. Thus prepared, he thought the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and learning might furnish matter for a satire, that would be useful and diverting: he resolved to proceed in a manner, that should be altogether new, the world having been already too long nauseated with endless repetitions upon every subject. The abuses in religion he proposed to set forth in the allegory of the coats, and the three brothers, which was to make up the body of the discourse. Those in learning he chose to introduce by way of digressions. He was then a young gentleman much in the world, and wrote to the taste of those who were like himself; therefore, in order to allure them, he gave a liberty to his pen, which might not suit with maturer years, or graver characters, and which he could have easily corrected with a very few blots, had he been master of his papers for a year or two before their publication. Not that he would have governed his judg |