Is a civil mutineer, and as all mutinies for the most part are for pay,
if it were not for that he would never trouble himself with it. His
business is to kindle and blow up discontents against the Government,
that, when they are inflamed, he may have the fairer opportunity to rob
and plunder, while those that are concerned are employed in quenching
it. He endeavours to raise tumults and, if he can, civil war--a remedy
which no man that means well to his country can endure to think on
though the disease were never so desperate. He is a State mountebank,
whose business is to persuade the people that they are not well in
health, that he may get their money to make them worse. If he be a
preacher, he has the advantage of all others of his tribe, for he has a
way to vent sedition by wholesale; and as the foulest purposes have most
need of the fairest pretences, so when sedition is masked under the veil
of piety, religion, conscience, and holy duty, it propagates wonderfully
among the rabble, and he vents more in an hour from the pulpit than
others by news and politics can do in a week. Next him, writers and
libellers are most pernicious, for though the contagion they disperse
spreads slower and with less force than preaching, yet it lasts longer,
and in time extends to more, and with less danger to the author, who is
not easily discovered if he use any care to conceal himself. And
therefore, as we see stinging-flies vex and provoke cattle most
immediately before storms, so multitudes of those kinds of vermin do
always appear to stir up the people before the beginning of all
troublesome times, and nobody knows who they are or from whence they
came, but only that they were printed the present year that they may not
lose the advantage of being known to be new. Some do it only out of
humour and envy, or desire to see those that are above them pulled down
and others raised in their places, as if they held it a kind of freedom
to change their governors, though they continue in the same condition
themselves still, only they are a little better pleased with it in
observing the dangers greatness is exposed to. He delights in nothing so
much as civil commotions, and, like a porpoise, always plays before a
storm. Paper and tinder are both made of the same material, rags, but he
converts them both into the same again and makes his paper tinder.