While the warmth of youth, the flattery of crowds, and a continual series of success and triumph, indulged your Majesty in this allusion of mind, it was less to be wondered at, that you proceeded in this mistaken pursuit of grandeur; but when age, disappointments, public calamities, personal distempers, and the reverse of all that makes men forget their true being, are fallen upon you:  heavens! is it possible you can live without remorse?  Can the wretched man be a tyrant?  Can grief study torments?  Can sorrow be cruel?—­

“Your Majesty will observe, I do not bring against you a railing accusation; but as you are a strict professor of religion, I beseech your Majesty to stop the effusion of blood, by receiving the opportunity which presents itself, for the preservation of your distressed people.  Be no longer so infatuated, as to hope for renown from murder and violence:  but consider, that the great day will come, in which this world and all its glory shall change in a moment:  when nature shall sicken, and the earth and sea give up the bodies committed to them, to appear before the last tribunal.  Will it then, O king! be an answer for the lives of millions who have fallen by the sword, ’They perished for my glory’?  That day will come on, and one like it is immediately approaching:  injured nations advance towards thy habitation:  vengeance has begun its march, which is to be diverted only by the penitence of the oppressor.  Awake, O monarch, from thy lethargy!  Disdain the abuses thou hast received:  pull down the statue which calls thee immortal:  be truly great:  tear thy purple, and put on sackcloth.

“I am,

“Thy generous Enemy,

“ISAAC BICKERSTAFF.”

St. James’s Coffee-house, June 1.

Advices from Brussels of the 6th instant, N.S., say, his Highness Prince Eugene had received a letter from Monsieur Torcy, wherein that Minister, after many expressions of great respect, acquaints him, that his master had absolutely refused to sign the preliminaries to the treaty which he had, in his Majesty’s behalf, consented to at the Hague.  Upon the receipt of this intelligence, the face of things at that place were immediately altered, and the necessary orders were transmitted to the troops (which lay most remote from thence) to move towards the place of rendezvous with all expedition.  The enemy seem also to prepare for the field, and have at present drawn together twenty-five thousand men in the plains of Lenz.  Marshal Villars is at the head of those troops; and has given the generals under his command all possible assurances, that he will turn the fate of the war to the advantage of his master.