calamities, he has, indeed, attempted to justify obliquely the corruption that has been charged upon him: but you have not properly in issue these services. You cannot admit the evidence of any such services received directly from him, as a matter of recriminatory charge upon the House of Commons, because you have not suffered that House to examine into the validity and merit of this plea. We have not been heard upon this recriminatory charge, which makes a considerable part of the demeanor of the prisoner; we cannot be heard upon it; and therefore I demand, on the part of the Commons of Great Britain, that it be dismissed from your consideration; and this I demand, whether you take it as an attempt to render odions the conduct of the Commons; whether you take it in mitigation of the punishment due to the prisoner for his crimes; or whether it be adduced as a presumption, that so virtuous a servant never could be guilty of the offences with which we charge him. In whichever of these lights you may be inclined to consider this matter, I say you have it not in evidence before you; and therefore you must expunge it from your thoughts, and separate it entirely from your judgment. I shall hereafter have occasion to say a few words on this subject of merits. I have said thus much at present, in order to remove extraneous impressions from your minds. For admitting that your lordships are the best judges, as I well know that you are, yet I cannot say that you are not men, and that matter of this kind, however irrelevant, may not make an impression upon you. It does, therefore, become us to take some occasional notice of these supposed services, not in the way of argument, but with a view by one sort of prejudice to destroy another prejudice. If there is any thing in evidence which tends to destroy this plea of merits, we shall recur to that evidence; if there is nothing to destroy it but argument, we shall have recourse to that argument; and if we support that argument by authority and document, not in your lordships' minutes, I

hope it will not be the less considered as good argument, because it is so supported.

I must now call your lordships' attention from the vaunted services of the prisoner, which have been urged to convict us of ingratitude, to another part of his recriminatory defence. He says, my lords, that we have not only oppressed him with unjust charges, (which is a matter for your lordships to judge, and is now the point at issue between us,) but that instead of attacking him by fair judicial modes of proceeding, by stating crimes clearly and plainly, and by proving those crimes, and showing their necessary consequences, we have oppressed him with all sorts of foul and abusive language; so much so, that every part of our proceeding has, in the eye of the world, more the appearance of private revenge, than of public justice.

Against this impudent and calumnious recriminatory accusation, which your lordships have thought good to suffer him to utter here, at a time too when all dignity is in danger of being trodden under foot, we will say nothing by way of defence. The Commons of Great Britain, my lords, are a rustic people; a tone of rusticity is therefore the proper accent of their managers. We are not acquainted with the nrbanity and politeness of extortion and oppression: nor do we know any thing of the sentimental delicacies of bribery and corruption. We speak the language of truth, and we speak it in the plain, simple terms in which truth ought to be spoken. Even if we have any thing to answer for on this head, we can only answer to the body which we represent and to that body which hears us; to any others we owe no apology whatever.

The prisoner at your bar admits that the crimes which we charge him with are of that atrocity, that if brought home to him he merits death. Yet when in pursuance of our duty, we come to state these crimes with their proper criminatory epithets, when we state in strong and direct terms the circumstances which heighten and aggravate them, when we

dwell on the immoral and heinous nature of the acts, and the terrible effects which such acts produce, and when we offer to prove both the principal facts, and the aggravatory ones by evidence, and to show their nature and quality by the rules of law, morality, and policy, then this criminal, then his counsel, then his accomplices and hirelings, posted in newspapers and dispersed in circles through every part of the kingdom, represent him as an object of great compassion; because he is treated, say they, with nothing but opprobrious names and scurrilous invectives.

To all this the managers of the Commons will say nothing by way of defence, it would be to betray their trust if they did. No, my lords, they have another and a very different duty to perform on this occasion. They are bound not to suffer public opinion, which often prevents judgment and often defeats its effects, to be debauched and corrupted. Much less is this to be suffered in the presence of our coordinate branch of legislature, and as it were with your and our own tacit acquiescence. Whenever the public mind is misled, it becomes the duty of the Commons of Great Britain to give it a more proper tone and a juster way of thinking. When ignorance and corruption have usurped the professor's chair, and placed themselves in the seats of science and of virtue, it is high time for us to speak out. We know that the doctrines of folly are of great use to the professors of We know that it is one of the signs of a corrupt and degenerate age, and one of the means of insuring its further corruption and degeneracy, to give mild and lenient epithets to vices and to crimes. The world is much influenced by names. And as terms are the representatives of sentiments, when persons who exercise any censorial magistracy seem in their language to compromise with crimes and criminals, by expressing no horror of the one or detestation of the other, the world will naturally think that they act merely to acquit themselves in its sight in form, but in reality to evade their duty. Yes, my lords, the world must think, that such per

vice.

sons palter with their sacred trust, and are tender to crimes, because they look forward to the future possession of the same power, which they now prosecute, and purpose to abuse it in the manner it has been abused by the criminal of whom they are so tender.

To remove such an imputation from us, we assert, that the Commons of Great Britain are not to receive instructions about the language which they ought to hold, from the gentlemen who have made profitable studies in the academies of Benares and of Oude. We know, and therefore do not want to learn, how to comport ourselves in prosecuting the haughty and overgrown delinquents of the East. We cannot require to be instructed by them, in what words we shall express just indignation at enormous crimes; for we have the example of our great ancestors to teach us. We tread in their steps and we speak in their language.

Your lordships well know, for you must be conversant in this kind of reading, that you once had before you a man of the highest rank in this country, one of the greatest men of the law, and one of the greatest men of the state, a peer of your own body, Lord Macclesfield. Yet, my lords, when that peer did but just modestly hint, that he had received hard measure from the Commons and their managers, those managers thought themselves bound seriatim one after another, to express the utmost indignation at the charge, in the harshest language that could be used. Why did they do so? They knew it was the language that became them. They lived in an age in which politeness was as well understood and as much cultivated, as it is at present; but they knew what they were doing, and they were resolved to use no language but what their ancestors had used, and to suffer no insolence which their ancestors would not have suffered. We tread in their steps; we pursue their method; we learn of them; and we shall never learn at any other school.

We know from history and the records of this House, that a Lord Bacon has been before you. Who is there, that upon

hearing this name does not instantly rscognise every thing of genius the most profound, every thing of literature the most extensive, every thing of discovery the most penetrating, every thing of observation on human life the most distinguishing and refined? All these must be instantly recognised, for they are all inseparably associated with the name of Lord Verulam. Yet when this prodigy was brought before your lordships, by the Commons of Great Britain, for having permitted his menial servant to receive presents, what was his demeanor? Did he require his counsel not "to let down the dignity of his defence?" No. That Lord Bacon whose least distinction was, that he was a Peer of England, a Lord High Chancellor, and the son of a Lord Keeper, behaved like a man who knew himself; like a man who was conscious of merits of the highest kind; but who was at the same time conscious of having fallen into guilt. The House of Commons did not spare him. They brought him to your bar. They found spots in that sun. And what, I again ask, was his behavior? That of contrition, that of humility, that of repentance, that which belongs to the greatest men lapsed and fallen through human infirmity into error. He did not hurl defiance at the accusations of his country, he bowed himself before it, yet with all his penitence he could not esuape the pursuit of the House of Commons, and the inflexible justice of this court. Your lordships fined him £40,000, notwithstanding all his merits; notwithstanding his humility; notwithstanding his contrition; notwithstanding the decorum of his behavior, so well suited to a man under the prosecution of the Commons of England, before the Peers of England. You fined him in a sum fully equal to £100,000 of the present day. You imprisoned him during the king's pleasure; and you disqualified him for ever from having a seat in this House, and any office in this kingdom. This is the way, in which the Commons behaved formerly, and in which your lordships acted formerly; when no culprit at this bar dared to hurl a recriminatory accusation against