eld the verdict, on the ground that the juries, in their
assessment of damages, had been "influenced by a righteous indignation
at the conduct of those who sought to exercise arbitrary power over all
the King's subjects, to violate Magna Charta, and to destroy the liberty
of the kingdom, by insisting on the legality of this general warrant."
Such a justification would hardly be admitted now. But, in a subsequent
trial, a still higher authority, the Chief-justice of the King's Bench,
Lord Mansfield, held language so similar, that, once more to quote the
words of Lord Campbell, "without any formal judgment, general warrants
have ever since been considered illegal."

However, the release of Wilkes on the ground of his parliamentary
privilege gave him but a momentary triumph, or rather respite. The
prosecution was not abated by the decision that he could not be
imprisoned before trial; while one effect of his liberation was to
stimulate the minister to add another count to the indictment preferred
against him, on which he might be expected to find it less easy to
excite the sympathy of any party. Wilkes had not always confined his
literary efforts to political pamphlets. There was a club named the
Franciscans (in compliment to Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord Bute's
Chancellor of the Exchequer, who, as well as Lord Sandwich, the First
Lord of the Admiralty, was one of its members), which met at Medmenham
Abbey, on the banks of the Thames, and there held revels whose license
recalled the worst excesses of the preceding century. To this club
Wilkes also belonged; and, in indulgence of tastes in harmony with such
a brotherhood, he had composed a blasphemous and indecent parody on
Pope's "Essay on Man," which he entitled "An Essay on Woman," and to
which he appended a body of burlesque notes purporting to be the
composition of Pope's latest commentator, the celebrated Dr. Warburton,
Bishop of Gloucester. He had never published it (indeed, it may be
doubted whether, even in that not very delicate age, any publisher could
have been found to run the risk of issuing so scandalous a work), but he
had printed a few copies in his own house, of which he designed to make
presents to such friends as he expected to appreciate it. He had not,
however, so far as it appears, given away a single copy, when, on the
very first day of the next session of Parliament, Lord Sandwich himself
brought the parody under the notice of the House of Lords. If the