of defence. The Commons of Great Britain, my Lords, are a rustick people; a tone of rusticity is therefore the proper accent of their managers. We are not acquainted with the urbanity 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 shew 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 co-ordinate branch of legislature, and as it were with your and our own tacit acquiescence. Whenever the publick 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 vice. 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 inAnd as terms are the re

fluenced by names. presentatives 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 persons 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 se. riatim 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

not instantly recognise 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 demeanour? 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 behaviour? That of contrition, that of humility, that of repentance, that which belongs to the greatest men lapsed and fallen through human infirmity into error. did not hurl defiance at the accusations of his country, he bowed himself before it, yet with all his penitence he could not escape the pursuit

He