Ind. If you have them cheaper at either of the Universities, I will give you mine for nothing.
Book. You shall have your Money immediately, and pray remember that I must have two Latin Seditious Motto’s and one Greek Moral Motto for Pamphlets by to-morrow Morning....
Ind. Sir, I shall provide them. Be pleas’d to look on that, Sir, and print me Five hundred Proposals, and as many Receipts.
Book. Proposals for printing by Subscription a new Translation of Cicero, Of the Nature of the Gods and his Tusculan Questions, by Jeremy Index, Esq.; I am sorry you have undertaken this, for it prevents a Design of mine.
Ind. Indeed, Sir, it does not, for you see all of the Book that I ever intend to publish. It is only a handsome Way of asking one’s Friends for a Guinea.
Book. Then you have not translated a Word of it, perhaps.
Ind. Not a single Syllable.
Book. Well, you shall have your Proposals forthwith; but I desire you wou’d be a little more reasonable in your Bills for the future, or I shall deal with you no longer; for I have a certain Fellow of a College, who offers to furnish me with Second-hand Motto’s out of the Spectator for Two-pence each.
Ind. Sir, I only desire to live by my Goods, and I hope you will be pleas’d to allow some difference between a neat fresh Piece, piping hot out of the Classicks, and old thread-bare worn-out Stuff that has past thro’ ev’ry Pedant’s Mouth. …”
The latter part of this amusing dialogue, referring to Mr. Index’s translation from Cicero, was added in an amended version of the Author’s Farce, which appeared some years later, and in which Fielding depicts the portrait of another all-powerful personage in the literary life,—the actor-manager. This, however, will be more conveniently treated under its proper date, and it is only necessary to say here that the slight sketches of Marplay and
