s motives. They say, that, through
corruption, or malice, or folly, he was acting his part in a plot to
make his friend Mr. Fox pass for a republican, and thereby to prevent
the gracious intentions of his sovereign from taking effect, which at
that time had begun to disclose themselves in his favor.[8] This is a
pretty serious charge. This, on Mr. Burke's part, would be something
more than mistake, something worse than formal irregularity. Any
contumely, any outrage, is readily passed over, by the indulgence which
we all owe to sudden passion. These things are soon forgot upon
occasions in which all men are so apt to forget themselves. Deliberate
injuries, to a degree, must be remembered, because they require
deliberate precautions to be secured against their return.

I am authorized to say for Mr. Burke, that he considers that cause
assigned for the outrage offered to him as ten times worse than the
outrage itself. There is such a strange confusion of ideas on this
subject, that it is far more difficult to understand the nature of the
charge than to refute it when understood. Mr. Fox's friends were, it
seems, seized with a sudden panic terror lest he should pass for a
republican. I do not think they had any ground for this apprehension.
But let us admit they had. What was there in the Quebec Bill, rather
than in any other, which could subject him or them to that imputation?
Nothing in a discussion of the French Constitutions which might arise on
the Quebec Bill, could tend to make Mr. Fox pass for a republican,
except he should take occasion to extol that state of things in France
which affects to be a republic or a confederacy of republics. If such an
encomium could make any unfavorable impression on the king's mind,
surely his voluntary panegyrics on that event, not so much introduced as
intruded into other debates, with which they had little relation, must
have produced that effect with much more certainty and much greater
force. The Quebec Bill, at worst, was only one of those opportunities
carefully sought and industriously improved by himself. Mr. Sheridan had
already brought forth a panegyric on the French system in a still higher
strain, with full as little demand from the nature of the business
before the House, in a speech too good to be speedily forgotten. Mr. Fox
followed him without any direct call from the subject-matter, and upon
the same ground. To canvass the merits of the French Constitution on the
Qu