rtained with whom it
was his wish to form an eternal connection. Foolish he would have been
at that time of life (more foolish than any man who undertakes a public
trust would be thought) to adhere to a cause which he, amongst all those
who were engaged in it, had the least sanguine hopes of as a road to
power.

There are who remember, that, on the removal of the Whigs in the year
1766, he was as free to choose another connection as any man in the
kingdom. To put himself out of the way of the negotiations which were
then carrying on very eagerly and through many channels with the Earl of
Chatham, he went to Ireland very soon after the change of ministry, and
did not return until the meeting of Parliament. He was at that time free
from anything which looked like an engagement. He was further free at
the desire of his friends; for, the very day of his return, the Marquis
of Rockingham wished him to accept an employment under the new system.
He believes he might have had such a situation; but again he cheerfully
took his fate with the party.

It would be a serious imputation upon the prudence of my friend, to have
made even such trivial sacrifices as it was in his power to make for
principles which he did not truly embrace or did not perfectly
understand. In either case the folly would have been great. The question
now is, whether, when he first practically professed Whig principles, he
understood what principles he professed, and whether in his book he has
faithfully expressed them.

When he entered into the Whig party, he did not conceive that they
pretended to any discoveries. They did not affect to be better Whigs
than those were who lived in the days in which principle was put to the
test. Some of the Whigs of those days were then living. They were what
the Whigs had been at the Revolution,--what they had been during the
reign of Queen Anne,--what they had been at the accession of the present
royal family.

What they were at those periods is to be seen. It rarely happens to a
party to have the opportunity of a clear, authentic, recorded
declaration of their political tenets upon the subject of a great
constitutional event like that of the Revolution. The Whigs had that
opportunity,--or to speak more properly, they made it. The impeachment
of Dr. Sacheverell was undertaken by a Whig ministry and a Whig House of
Commons, and carried on before a prevalent and steady majority of Whig
peers. It was carried on for the