dies, but our follies; not our works, but our idle

nesses.

Some comfort however it is, that all of them are innocent, and most of them, slight as they are, had yet a moral tendency; either to soften the virulence of parties against each other; or to laugh out of countenance some vice or folly of the time; or to discredit the impositions of quacks and false pretenders to science; or to humble the arrogance of the ill-natured and envious; in a word, to lessen the vanity, and promote the good humour of mankind.

Such as they are, we must in truth confess, they are ours, and others should in justice believe, they are all that are ours. If any thing else has been printed, in which we really had any hand, it is either intolerably imperfect, or loaded with spurious additions; sometimes even with insertions of men's names which we never meant, and for whom we have an esteem and respect. Even those pieces, in which we are least injured, have never before been printed from the true copies, or with any tolerable degree of correctness. We declare, that this collection contains every piece, which in the idlest humour we have written; not only such as came under our review or correction, but many others, which, however unfinished, are not now in our power to suppress. Whatsoever was in our own possession at the publishing hereof, or of which no copy was gone abroad, we have actually destroyed, to prevent all possibility of the like treatment.

These volumes likewise will contain all the papers, wherein we have casually had any share; particularly those written in conjunction with our friends, Dr Arbuthnot and Mr Gay; and lastly, all this sort composed singly by either of those hands. The reader is therefore desired to do the same justice to these our friends, as to us; and to be assured

that all the things, called our Miscellanies (except the works of Alexander Pope, published by B. Lintot, in quarto and folio, in 1717; those of Mr Gay, by J. Tonson, in quarto, in 1720; and as many of these Miscellanies as have been formerly printed by Benj. Tooke) are absolutely spurious, and without our consent imposed upon the public.

JONATH. SWIft. ALEX. POPe.

ADVERTISEMENT

ΤΟ

A FOURTH VOLUME.-1729.

Of the following volume we need only say, that it contains the remainder of those Miscellaneous Pieces, which were in some sort promised in the Preface to the former volumes, or which have been written since. The Verses are paged separately, that they may be added to that volume, which wholly consists of Verse, and the Treatise of the Bathos placed in their stead in this. The reader may be assured no other edition is either genuine or complete, and that they are all the things of this kind which will ever be printed by the same hands. There are in this volume, as in the former, one or two small pieces by other hands.

ADVERTISEMENT

TO THE

FIFTH AND SIXTH VOLUMES.-1736.

As most of this Author's Writings have been already published in "The Drapier's Letters," "Gulliver's Travels," and the four volumes of "Miscellanies," printed for Messieurs Motte and Gulliver, it would have been injurious to the English buyer, as well as proprietor, to have reprinted here the Dublin edition of his Works. We are therefore only to assure both that these two volumes consist of such pieces as are NOT in the fore-mentioned volumes, but, excepting three Tatlers, contain every thing in the Dublin edition besides.