“That’s one of your best four-foot ones.” Now we profess to make none but best, the glasses of every one being true ground and rightly adjusted, and the difference in price arrises only from the goodness, ornaments, and convenience of the case, neither can he produce a four-foot one of anybody’s make, that does not far exceed his two-foot, nor does his two-foot one at all exceed ours, which they don’t now pretend. And therefore the lie is all on his side, and the impossibility in his pretensions is as strong as ever, and what we have said is just truth, and his foul language no better than Billingsgate railing. But it seems because we do not treat him in his own way and decry his goods as much as he does other men’s, he has the folly to construct it as an acknowledgement that his excel. But we are so far from allowing that, that we do aver they have nothing to brag of but what they learnt of us, and Brandreth was so indifferent a workman that Marshall, who had taken him for a journeyman, was fain to turn him off. The secrets they brag of is all a falsehood, and the microscope the same that any one may have from Culpeper who is the maker. We have already told the world that we will venture any wager upon the performance of our two foot telescope against theirs, and we would be glad to have it taken up that we might have the opportunity of showing that ours exceeds, and letting the world see that his brags are only such as mountebanks make in medicine.
Finally, in the Daily Courant for May 12, 1707, Willdey and Brandreth once again insert their vaunt, and then proceed to demolish their late employers thus:—
We do affirm it [the telescope made by W. & B.] to be the pleasantest and usefullest instrument of this kind, and what our adversaries have said against it is false and proceeds from an ill design; we have already offered to lay them 20 guineas to their 10 that they could not make a better, but they knowing they were not capable to engage us in that particular, said in their answer that there needs no more than to compare one instrument with another that they may have the opportunity of shewing