rgill having spoken to the proprietaries,
they agreed to a meeting with me at Mr. T. Penn's house in Spring
Garden. The conversation at first consisted of mutual declarations of
disposition to reasonable accommodations, but I suppose each party had
its own ideas of what should be meant by reasonable. We then went into
consideration of our several points of complaint, which I enumerated.
The proprietaries justify'd their conduct as well as they could, and I
the Assembly's. We now appeared very wide, and so far from each other
in our opinions as to discourage all hope of agreement. However, it
was concluded that I should give them the heads of our complaints in
writing, and they promis'd then to consider them. I did so soon after,
but they put the paper into the hands of their solicitor, Ferdinand
John Paris, who managed for them all their law business in their great
suit with the neighbouring proprietary of Maryland, Lord Baltimore,
which had subsisted 70 years, and wrote for them all their papers and
messages in their dispute with the Assembly. He was a proud, angry
man, and as I had occasionally in the answers of the Assembly treated
his papers with some severity, they being really weak in point of
argument and haughty in expression, he had conceived a mortal enmity to
me, which discovering itself whenever we met, I declin'd the
proprietary's proposal that he and I should discuss the heads of
complaint between our two selves, and refus'd treating with any one but
them. They then by his advice put the paper into the hands of the
Attorney and Solicitor-General for their opinion and counsel upon it,
where it lay unanswered a year wanting eight days, during which time I
made frequent demands of an answer from the proprietaries, but without
obtaining any other than that they had not yet received the opinion of
the Attorney and Solicitor-General. What it was when they did receive
it I never learnt, for they did not communicate it to me, but sent a
long message to the Assembly drawn and signed by Paris, reciting my
paper, complaining of its want of formality, as a rudeness on my part,
and giving a flimsy justification of their conduct, adding that they
should be willing to accommodate matters if the Assembly would send out
some person of candour to treat with them for that purpose, intimating
thereby that I was not such.

The want of formality or rudeness was, probably, my not having
address'd the paper to them with th