Maitland Club > Works of Sir Thomas Urquhart

THE DESIGNE. 337
Frankindal's money, for being master of the purse wherein it was. Those
wretched and unequitable courses, indefatigably prosecuted by mercilels
men to the utter undoing of the Author and exterminion of his name,
have induced him, out of his respect to antiquity, his piety to succel'sion,
and that intim regard of himself which by divine injunction ought to be
the rule and measure of his love towards his neighbour, to set down in this
parcel of his Introduction, the cruel usage wherewith he hath been served
these many years past by that inexorable race, the lamentable preparatives
which, by granting their desires, would ensue to the extirpation of worthie
pedigrees, and the unexemplifyable injustice thereby redounding to him
who never was in any thing obliged to them. The premifses he enlargeth
with divers quaint and pertinent similies, and after a neat apparelling of
usury in its holiday garments, he deduceth, from the laws and customs of
all nations, the tender care that ought to be had in the preservation of
ancient families ; the particulars whereof, in matter of ordonance, he
evidenceth by the acts of Solon, the decrees of the Decemvirs, and statutes
of the Twelve Tables ; and for its executional part, in the persons of Q.
Fabius, Tiberius the Emperor, and the Israelitish observers of the sacred
institution of Jubilees. By which enarration nothing is more clearly in-
ferred, then that, seeing both Jews and Gentiles, Painims and Christians,
in their both monarchical and polyarchical governments, have been so
zealous in their obsequiousnefs to so pious a mandate, that the present age
being no lei's concerned in the happy fruits thereof then the good dayes of
old, the splendid authority of this Isle should be pleased not to eclipse
their commendation by innovating any thing in the Author's case. Who,
decyphering the implacability of flagitators, by showing how they throw in
obstacles retarding their own payment, thereby tacitly to hasten his de-
struction, and hinting at the unnatural breach of some of his fiduciaries,
he particularizeth the candor of his own endeavours, and nixuriencie to
give all men contentment ; the discourse whereof, in all its periods, very
well deserveth the serious animadversion of the ingenious Reader.
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