66 following paragraph: "The House of Lords "must now be admitted to be highly important-as a political assembly, notwithstanding it has, of late, appeared to be no"thing more than a chamber where the minister's edicts, are registered for forms' sake. Some of their lordships are determined to vindicate their importance. It is there, that the dresses of the Opera dancers " are regulated! One of the Roman Emperors recommended to the Senate, when they were good for nothing else, to discuss "what was the best sauce for a turbot. To 66 "forced by the violence of the times;" and, the whole proceeding was imputed to party. “rancour and popular clamour." That this was audaciously libellous will, surely, not admit of a doubt, especially with those who have affixed the epithet "libellous" to the reports of the Naval Commissioners; and, Sir, I think, it may be safely asserted, that a libel so audacious was never before, in any English print, your weekly paper (of which more hereafter)not excepted, published against either House of Parliament. And, because a libel like this, published in a ministerial paper, be noticed by the Opposi- regulate the length of a petticoat is a much tion, are all the prints in England to be threat- "more genteel employment." This paraened with a total change of the system upon graph, which was certainly a gross libel, Mr. which they have been conducted! Are we, Perry declared, that he never saw, till it was for this cause, to be bidden to tremble, and too late to stop the circulation of the paper to hear proclaimed a "new ara" in the his- which contained it. He acknowledged that tory of the press! At this moment there oc- it was a gross and scandalous libel; that it cur to me only two instances of serious pro- expressed sentiments which he had never enceedings against printers, publishers, or au- tertained; that he was deeply penetrated thors, for breach of parliamentary privilege with sorrow for its having appeared in his pain their publications; I mean those relating per; and that, the Printer, being perfectly to Mr. Reeves in 1795, in the House of Com- innocent of all intention to offend, he, Mr. nons, and those relating to Mr. Perry, in Perry, humbly hoped that their lordships 1798, in the House of Lords. Mr. Reeves would pardon him, whatever might be their wrote a pamphlet, in which was the follow- determination with respect to himself. Both ang passage: The government of England Proprietor and Printer were, however, fined " is a monarchy, the monarch is the ancient each 501. besides being obliged to pay nearly "stock, from which have sprung those 501, each in fees; and were imprisoned in goodly branches of the legislature, the Newgate for the space of three months. "Lords and Commons, that at the same Now, Sir, compare these libels and the pro"time give ornament to the tree, and afford ceedings thereon, with the libel which Mr. "shelter to those who seek protection un- Stuart was instigated to publish and the sub"der it. But, these are still only branches, sequent proceedings relative thereto. Mr. "and derive their origin and nutriment Reeves's was a metaphorical libel; few peo" from their common parent; they may be ple could possibly suppose that it was written lopped off, and the tree is a tree still; or published with any evil intention; its shorn, indeed, of its honours, . but not, meaning admitted of many interpretations; "like them, cast into the fire. The kingly and, at last, though almost every public print government may go on, in all its func- in London had, in the interim, joined in the "tions, without Lords or Commons: it has cry against him, a jury determined, that it " heretofore done so for years together, and, was no libel at all. The libel published by "in our times, it does so during every recess Mr. Perry called loudly for animadversion: " of parliament; but, without the King his it was disrespectful and contemptuous in a "parliament is no more." Of this passage, very high degree: it was as false, but it was respecting which I have before given an opi- not nearly so malicious as the libel, which nion to which still adhere, I shall only fur- Mr. Stuart was induced to publish, and ther observe, at present, that the House de- which accuses the House of Commons of clared it to be "a malicious, scandalous, and having, in their judicial capacity, passed an "seditious libel," that the author was ordered unjust judgment from foolish or wicked moto be prosecuted by the law officers of the tives, than which, in my opinion, it is crown, and that, amongst the persons who voted impossible to conceive any thing more for these measures, were yourself and Mr. libellous in itself, or more likely to be proPitt, by whom no struggle was made to save ductive of mischievous consequences. Then, Mr. Reeves, who, however, found protection as to the subsequent conduct of the gentlein a jury, in the Court of King's Bench. The men, of whom we are speaking; Mr. Ferry affair of Mr. Perry terminated more serious-clearly acknowledges the libellousness of the ly. He published in his paper, the Morning publication, states his ignorance of its inser Chronicle of the 19th of March, 1799, the tion, and his deep regret at its having been polis; but, to leave nothing dubious as to this fact, I positively assert, that you were the principal comiuctor of that print, of which assertion, if required, I can, at any time, prove the truth. Upon looking over the 30 numbers, to which the Anti-Jacobin extended, I should suppose, that about one-fourth part of its contents consists of comments upon the speeches of members of parliament, and upon their conduct as members of parlia ment. As a specimen of these comments one might take the passage, where you speck of "that man's speech, who stood up in his "place in the House of Peers, and, as the "best way of furnishing the enemy with ar 66 inserted. Mr. Stuart comes with his mouth teeming with praises of the person, for censuring whose conduct he had libelled the House: he comes with a statement of his own virtues and services: he very nearly tells the House, that, had it not been for him and Lord Melville, they would not have been in existence either to pardon the one or to condemn the other. Mr. Perry did nothing of this sort; he attempted no justifica'tion; tendered no set-off; offered no impertinent ssuggestions; threw out no saucy insinuations against either side, or any member of the House: yet, was he, and his printer along with him, fined in a considerable sum, and imprisoned three months in Newgate. And now, behold, because a ministerial writer, or rather printer, has not been suffered openly and unequivocally to charge the House of Commons with intemperance, presumption, and injustice in a decision, in their judicial capacity; because he has not been suffered to do this with perfect impu-were thus publishing upon his conduct, were, nity, all of us, who are concerned in the conducting of the press, are to be told that " a new era has begun," and are to be threatened with a total change of the system of forbearance," as it is called, under which we have hitherto written and published !→ Very wide indeed is the difference between censuring the language, opinions, and conduct of individual members, or of parties, and censuring the decisions of either House guments, without endangering his head, "declared that he put himself in the place of "the French Directory, and spoke accord ingly." (Anti-Jacobin, No. 2.) What man you alluded to here I cannot say; but he must have been a peer of the realm, and it ought to be remembered, that you, who at the same time, a member of the House of gross falsehoods" in his place in parlis of parliament, particularly decisions in its ju-ment; as having attempted “ to cozen” in dicial capacity; but, in censures of the former description, there are very few of the public prints which have not refrained from asperity of language when speaking of the conduct of members of parliament, as members of parliament; or, at least, which have not exercised a greater degree of cautiousness in such cases than in any other; and, if this practice has been departed from in any one instance more than in all others put together, it has been in that of the newspaper, of which you, Sir, was the principal conductor. This leads us to the THIRD point which I posed to consider, that is to say, the injudiciousness of the writer in the Oracle in selecting your name, under which to publish a threat against the editors of public papers, and that of Sir Henry Mildmay, under which to make a sort of protest against an alleged attempt to abridge the liberty of the press as to parliamentary proceedings.That you were the principal conductor of the newspaper, published in 1707 and 1798, called the "Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner," is notorious to all those who are connected with the press, and, indeed, to every one moving in the political circles of the metro House of Lords; and, in short, there is scarcely an act which a gentleman ought not to be guilty of, scarcely a quality which a gentleman ought not to be ashamed to possess, that was not imputed, over and over again, to Lord Moira; and this, as far as ap 'pears from your paper, for no other reason that that this nobleman had, in his place in the House of Peers, made a speech, in which be censured the conduct of the ministers. The many instances, in which you bestowed on other persons the name of "fool" and "liar," I shall, perhaps, refer to another time. At present I have confined myself to your attacks upon one particular person, which were avowedly made on him in consequence of something which he had spoken in his place in parliament, and which attacks will, I am persuaded, be found very far to surpass, in point of rudeness and malignity, any thing ever, before or since, published, in this country, by way of comment on the speeches of a member of parliament." It the public judge, then, of the decency of Mr. Stuart, in now proclaiming, under your name, the commencement of " a new era, and the cessation of the system of fir ning's elegant poetry of the Antijacobin is selling off at the price of waste-paper." Waste paper! What, Odes, Ballads, Needy Knife-Grinder, Miss Pottingen, and all!, All waste paper! To what base uses we may return, Horatio!" Yet, some persons diately concerned, the last use of even the --- bearance," merely because an atrocious libel in a ministerial print has, at last, been noticedBut, the injudiciousness of selecting your name for this purpose will appear still more evident upon looking back at your conduct relative to Mr. Perry, when he was, as we have just seen, punished for a li-doubt, whether, as far as you were inungbel on the House of Lords. This event ocurred at the very time that you were send-most unfortunate sheet of these volumes will ing forth to the public; in your print, the above-mentioned bels upon Lord Moira and others. Mr. Perry, supposing him to have seen, and even to have been the writer of, the libel that appeared in his paper, was only following your example, and following it, -toe, as I think I have shown, at a very humble distance. One would have thought, that to enjoy the advantages which you enjoyed, to combat behind a masked battery, while your adversary was exposed to all the dangers of literary and legal warfare; one would have thought, that this was enough to infuse into the meanest of minds some little portion of maghanimity. Not so, however, with you, who, instead of carefully abstaining from all remarks upon the subject of Mr. Perry's offence, while he was under the animadversion of the law, the moment of his being sent to prison you chose as the most proper for publishing upon his conduct strictures evidently intended to prevent the duration of his imprisonment from being shortened, and, if possible, to deprive him of the compassion of all those whose compassion was worth having. Mr. Perry's politics, relative to the French revolution, were, in my opinion, bad; while yours, as far as you could, with propriety, be said to have any politics, were good. But, this circumstance cannot change the character of your conduct as connected with the subject before us. It was, indeed, very generally thought, that the cause suffered not a little from the manner in which your department of the Anti-Jacobia was conducted; an opinion which, in all probability, prevented the continuation or the revival of that work, and the correctness of which opinion appears now to have received a pretty satisfactory verification in the well-known fact, that an edition of the Poetry of the Anti-Jacobia is now, by way of rf advertised for sale at the price of "posle paper." I speak here of what st be denied. A puff, in the words I have quoted, has recently appeared for several days successively in the Morning Post and other newspapers. In order to invite prople to a great book auction, they menticed certain great bargains, and, amongst others, that Mr. Canning's" (for they 4ven pet jour name, Str,)" Mr. Can not be fall as honourable as the first; and, indeed, this doubt would become a certainty were we, as a criterion of your work, to take that part, which records your triumph over Mr. Perry, while he was suffering under the exercise of that power, from which you felt yourself protected; which exhibits you, mounted upon your dunghill and surrounded by a fence to the tree-tops, clapping your wings and crowing out victory over an adversary, to the fall of whom neither your tąlents nor your courage had in anywise contributed. -And, Sir, was it, then, judicions in the upstart writer in the Oracle, to select your name, under which to complain of the conduct of Mr. Grey with regard to the author or publisher of the recent libel upon the House of Commons? Ought not that upstart writer to have recollected your conduct with regard to Mr. Perry? Or, are we to suppose, that he, as is not unfrequently the case with upstarts, regarded the public as having no right to exercise their senses in any way that might prove disadvantageous to him! The libel, recently published in the Oracle, was, beyond all comparison more inalignant, as well as more dangerous in its tendency, than the libel for which Mr. Perry was fined, and inprisoned in Newgate; and, therefore, I ask, what, recollecting, as he must, your conduct with respect to Mr. Perry; what degree of assurance, what effrontery, what insolence, must this upstart possess to enable him to publish, under your name, a complaint against the severity of those who had noticed the libel in the Oracle, and a threat of retaliation upon all the other prints in the country?--But, though the selection of your name was, I think it will be allowed, very injudicious, I question whether it will not be found, that the selection of the name of Sir Henry Mildmay, under which to make a sort of protest against an alleged attempt to abridge the liberty of the press, as to proceeding in parliament, was still more injudicious. It was Sir Henry Mildmay, he tells us, who presented to the House of Commons the petition, inserted in page 676 of the foregoing sheet. He the writer in the Oracle) says, that Mr. Stuart, the petitioner, came to the deter mination of soliciting some dependent "member of parliament to present his pe"tition, some gentleman whom all sides of "the House looked up to with respect and "esteem, and such a member he happily "found in the person of Sir Henry Mild may." Having thus characterized this gentleman, he, in another part of his paper of the 3d instant, pablishes a speech which he imputes to Mr. Windham, and another speech which he imputes to Sir Henry Mildmay. Mr. Windham is represented, and I dare say very truly, as being unable to restrain his indignation at, the insolence of the petition; while, on the other hand, Sir Henry Mildmay is represented as having declared, that he "could not perceive what "there was in the petition so improper as "to raise such indignation in the mind of "the Right Hon. Gentleman; he thought "the petitioner had stated nothing but what "he had fairly a right to state."-Upon reading these passages, one would be tempted to believe, that Mr. Stuart's pilgrimage, in search of an 'independent" man, was something like that of the philosopher with his lantern. But, surely, independent men are not so very rare to be met with amongst the members of the House of Commons! Surely, Sir Henry Mildmay, however independent, however respected and esteemed by all sides of the House," has no preten-sions to a monopoly of independence, respect, and esteem. Nothing is more foolish or more unjust than to suppose, that all those who are in office, or who may be reasonably presumed to lock towards office, are dependent, and, on the contrary, that all those, who have never been and are never likely to be in office, are independent." In"dependent" is, Sir, always an epithet of dabious, and, frequently of no very amiable meaning. It is, indeed, sometimes applied to men of high minds, of criginal thought, of action not waiting for the dictation of others, not influenced by considerations of self-gratification of any sort; and such men are always independent, whether in office or out, whether high or low in life. But, at other times, the word independent" is used for a very different purpose; for you shall hear it applied, with all the pompousness imaginable, to men who have no one of the characteristics of real independence; men who have too much money to need a salary, and too little sense to fill an office; who are too proud to be content to move in the circle for which nature, in a niggardly mood, has formed them, and yet, too mehn to refrain from becoming the tool, the maste cat's-paw, of a ininister, or, more frequently, of a minister's underling, with a view of ob taining titles, which they want the talents and the spirit to obtain by letters or by arms. We must, however, suppose, that it was in its better sense, that it was applied to Sir Henry Mildmay; but, upon that supposi tion, I carmot allow, that, amongst the members of the House of Commons, it could be so very great a difficulty to find an indepen dent man; while, as I think I am now about to show, it would, in one respect at least, have been very difficult indeed for this wri ter to have been more unfortunate in the selection of the name of a gentleman, under which to publish sentiments favourable, not only to the perfect liberty, but to the licen tiousness of the press, as to the proceedings of parliament.Sir Henry Mildmay, Sir, 'during the session of parliament which com menced in the autumn of 1800, made a speech in the House of Commons upon the subject of tythes, as connected with that of the encouragement of agriculture; and, in that speech, he broached an odd sort of preject for compelling the clergy to submit to composition in lieu of their tythes; the adoption of which project he seemed to regard as essentially necessary to remove the great discouragement to agriculture, which, according to his notion, existed in the right possessed by the clergy of choosing between a composition and the taking up of ther tythes in kind. In about ten or twelve day after this speech was published in the newspapers, a gentleman who happened to read it in the daily paper at that time publishe by me, wrote to me, for publication, a let ter commenting thereon. I knew the unter to be a clergyman of great respectability and of no small literary fame; I perfect agreed with him in opinion as to the ma principles upon which he proceeded; I a proved almost entirely of the matter, a had very little objection to any part of the manner of his letter; and, accordingly, I published it, agreeably to the writer's A quest. This brought a complaint from 3: Henry Mildmay in person. He asked m if I was aware, that, in publishing a coment upon a speech of a member of parismeut, I had committed a very grave offence, and had rendered myself liable to be sevend punished. He made use of some kind aapréssions towards ine, personally; said t Should be sorry to be instrumental in ruin; and was willing, on account of, my being a stranger to the laws and customset this country, (he and I were, I believe, bar about eight miles from one another!) to overlook my fault, provided I would, in thnext number of my paper, disavow or m tract what I had pallished as a comment an his speech, and make a suitable apology. I told him I was flattered by the good opinion he appeared to entertain of me, and that, when to that was added the indulgence he had been pleased to express his readiness to show on account of my ignorance of the laws and regulations to the severity of which I might have subjected myself, it was impossible that I should not be disposed to do every thing in my power to afford him satisfaction; but, that having published his speech, and being convinced, that, upon every thing once printed and published, any.one had a right to comment, I could not, consistently with my notions of the liberty of the press and of the justice of my correspondent's request, re- 1 fuse to insert the letter; and, that, having, for these reasons, deliberately inserted it, which reasons I had yet heard nothing to invalidate, I could not think of making an apology for the insertion. I informed him, besides, that, as to all the main points I perfectly agreed in opinion with the writer of the letter, and that, therefore, to disavow or retract the sentiments of the letter would be an act of meanness which I was sure he would not like to see me commit. I, moreover, assured him (and I did it with perfect sincerity), that no personal disrespect to him was meant by me; I observed, that, if my correspondent had mixed a little asperity with his reasoning, I trusted he would have the liberality to excuse it, when he considered that it had flowed, without much time for reflection perhaps, from the mind of a man irritated with what he could scarcely help regarding as an attack upon the order to which he belonged.- -All this had no effect. He still insisted, that the sentiments should be disavowed or retracted, and that an apology should be made. I then told him, that I had no objection to apologize for inserting the report of his speech; because I knew that to be an act of disobedience; but, that, as to the letter, I well knew that it was perfectly innocent in itself; that, as a comment upon a thing printed and published in a newspaper, I was sure it could be no breach of the privileges of parliament; and that, so far was I from being disposed to apologize for the insertion, that it becatae me frankly to tell him that I was just going to insert a second letter from the same writer upon the same subject, being very willing to acknowledge my fault in having published speeches of members of parliament, but being, at the same time, firmly resolved not to relinquish the right of pablishing comments on any thing that had once been printed and published. Finding him, however, still determined to proceed to extremities; still rising rather than falling in the terms of his menaces; I reminded him, that there would be found, too, something peculiar in this case; and, that, in fact, he himself, since he would force me to speak out, was the only person, to whom any blame could be reasonably imputed, he having expressly authorised the publication, and, having, indeed, been the publisher, of the speech, upon which the comment had been made. "You will find it very difficult to "prove that, I believe," said he, "No," said I, "I have a witness whose veracity I am certain you will not dispute." " Aye!" said he "who is he?" "Here it is," said I, producing the speech in that identical manuscript, which he had sent to my printing office, with a direction to have it inserted! We soon afterwards separated; he preferred no complaint against me to the House; the occurrence very soon dropped from my memory; and I dare say, Sir, I never should have thought of it again, had not the upstart writer in the Oracle absolutely driven it back into my mind, by holding up Sir Henry Mildmay as a person indulgent in the extreme to those who comment, not only upon the speeches but upon the decisions in parliament; and, indeed, as the approver of pert and insolent language in a man, who comes to obtain his release from a seven day's imprisonment, imposed in consequence of his having pub lished against the House and against its solemn decisions in the most solemn of its capacities, a libel which has, I believe, never before been equalled, in point of malignity, by any libel on any branch of the legislature. The imputation must be false. In the letter above-mentioned, there' was nothing libellous; nothing personal; nothing rude; nothing very harsh or severe : it was written by a gentlemm and a scholar, and it was, in every respect, worthy of its author. It contained, indeed, a refutation of the statements of the speech, and I thought it proved the speaker to be profoundly ignorant of the subject, which ho had been induced to bring forward to the House; but this was its only sin, and, surely, it was not one to be put in comparison with that of the libel of the Oracle. There is, as every one must perceive, a wide difference between even a libel upon a single member and a libel upon the House; but, besides, this, the letter I have been speaking of was merely an argumentative comment; its object was not censure: how, wide, therefore, was the difference between that letter; to which Sir Henry Mildmay was so tenderly alive for his own sake, and the paragraph in the Oracle, of which Mr. Grey complain |