mised, that he would eat a quarter of paschal lamb with them the next Sunday following.

All these protestations availed him nothing; for they threatened him, that all contractions and bargains should be void unless he would submit to bear all the outward and visible signs of Judaism.

Our apostate hearing this, stretched himself upon his back, spread his legs, and waited for the operation but when he saw the high-priest take up the cleft stick, he roared most unmercifully, and swore several Christian oaths, for which the Jews rebuked him.

The savour of the effluvia that issued from him, convinced the old Levite, and all his assistants, that he needed no present purgation; wherefore, without farther anointing him, he proceeded in his office; when, by an unfortunate jerk upward of the impatient victim, he lost five times as much as ever Jew did before.

They, finding that he was too much circumcised, which, by the Levitical law, is worse than not being circumcised at all, refused to stand to any of their contracts: wherefore they cast him forth from their synagogue; and he now remains a most piteous, woful, and miserable sight at the sign of the Old Testament and Dial in Fleet-street; his wife, poor woman, is at this hour lamenting over him, wringing her hands and tearing her hair; for the barbarous Jews still keep, and expose at Jonathan's and Garraway's, the memorial of her loss, and her husband's indignity.

PRAYER.

[To save the stamp.]

Keep us, we beseech thee, from the hands of such barbarous and cruel Jews, who albeit they abhor the blood of black puddings, yet thirst they vehemently after the blood of white ones. And that we may avoid such-like calamities, may all good and well-disposed Christians be warned by this unhappy wretch's woful example, to abominate the heinous sin of avarice, which, sooner or later, will draw them into the cruel clutches of Satan, Papists, Jews, and stockjobbers. Amen.

A KEY TO THE LOCK :

OR,

A TREATISE,

Proving beyond all contradiction the dangerous tendency of a late poem, entitled, The Rape of the Lock, to government and religion.

WRITTEN IN THE YEAR MDCCXIV.

359

A KEY TO THE LOCK.

SINCE this unhappy division of our nation into PARTIES, it is not to be imagined how many artifices have been made use of by writers to obscure the truth, and cover designs which may be detrimental to the public. In particular, it has been their custom of late to vent their political spleen in allegory and fable. If a honest believing nation is to be made a jest of, we have a story of John Bull and his wife; if a treasurer is to be glanced at, an ant with a white straw is introduced; if a treaty of commerce is to be ridiculed, it is immediately metamorphosed into a tale of Count Tariff.

But if any of these malevolents have a small talent in rhyme, they principally delight to convey their malice in that pleasing way; as it were, gilding the pill, and concealing the poison under the sweetness of numbers.

It is the duty of every well-designing subject to prevent, as far as he can, the ill consequences of such pernicious treatises; and I hold it mine to warn the public of a late poem, entitled, The RAPE of the Lock; which I shall demonstrate to be of this

nature.

It is a common and just observation, that, when the meaning of any thing is dubious, one can no way better judge of the true intent of it, than by consider