[Footnote 24:  A biting sneer at Walpole’s ignorance of Irish affairs. [T.S.]]

As to “swallowing these halfpence in fire-balls,” it is a story equally improbable.  For to execute this operation the whole stock of Mr. Wood’s coin and metal must be melted down and moulded into hollow balls with wild-fire, no bigger than a reasonable throat can be able to swallow.  Now the metal he hath prepared, and already coined will amount at least fifty millions of halfpence to be swallowed by a million and a half of people; so that allowing two halfpence to each ball, there will be about seventeen balls of wild-fire a-piece to be swallowed by every person in this kingdom, and to administer this dose, there cannot be conveniently fewer than fifty thousand operators, allowing one operator to every thirty, which, considering the squeamishness of some stomachs and the peevishness of young children, is but reasonable.  Now, under correction of better judgments, I think the trouble and charge of such an experiment would exceed the profit, and therefore I take this report to be spurious, or at least only a new scheme of Mr. Wood himself, which to make it pass the better in Ireland he would father upon a minister of state.

But I will now demonstrate beyond all contradiction that Mr. Walpole is against this project of Mr. Wood, and is an entire friend to Ireland, only by this one invincible argument, that he has the universal opinion of being a wise man, an able minister, and in all his proceedings pursuing the true interest of the King his master:  And that as his integrity is above all corruption, so is his fortune above all temptation.  I reckon therefore we are perfectly safe from that corner, and shall never be under the necessity of contending with so formidable a power, but be left to possess our brogues and potatoes in peace as remote from thunder as we are from Jupiter.

I am,
   My dear countrymen,
     Your loving fellow-subject,
       fellow-sufferer and humble servant. 
                                         M.B.

Oct. 13. 1724.

SEASONABLE ADVICE TO THE GRAND JURY.

SEASONABLE ADVICE TO THE GRAND JURY,

CONCERNING THE BILL PREPARING AGAINST THE PRINTER OF THE DRAPIER’S FOURTH LETTER.

Since a bill is preparing for the grand jury, to find against the printer of the Drapier’s last letter, there are several things maturely to be considered by those gentlemen, before whom this bill is to come, before they determine upon it.

FIRST, they are to consider, that the author of the said pamphlet, did write three other discourses on the same subject; which instead of being censured were universally approved by the whole nation, and were allowed to have raised, and continued that spirit among us, which hitherto hath kept out Wood’s coin:  For all men will allow, that if those pamphlets had not been writ, his coin must have overrun the nation some months ago.