be wronged-perchance ruined. The Nation, therefore, must not be subject to nonsuit for the private character of the individual. The King must prosecute, not the man.

JULIUS.

MY LORD,

LETTER VII.

TO LORD JOHN RUSSELL.

August 9, 1820.

I HAVE done you the justice to peruse your petition to his Majesty with especial attention. With the good people of England, my Lord, I am at a loss to account for the paradoxical compound of aristocratical gravity, and democratical fanaticism, which is discoverable in this precious document: We see your family rich and exalted, and really begin to express alarm for your intellects, from observing you most directly, most influentially, assisting a party with whom titular distinction is at the head of its proscription list, and property the lintelmark for confiscation and pillage.

This party, with our degraded Queen (permit me the epithet, my Lord, I appeal to her derogatory conduct alone since her return to England,) at its head, has prejudged the King and his responsible advisers "a foul conspi

racy, a domineering tyranny; which, having persecuted an innocent female for years, has now nearly reached its climax of iniquity, by importing a mass of perjury from the Continent, as an infallible wherewithal to dethrone, degrade, and debase the highest subject in the realm, and thereby to shake to its base the constitutional liberty of England, and subject its people to the lash of an insolent domination."

You, my Lord, to the infinite satisfaction of the designing supporters of such language as this, have seriously advised your Sovereign and his Ministers to plead guilty to its horrible accusations. In very sagaciously demanding what paramount state necessity renders the coming trial of the Queen indispensable to the cause of justice, you seem to be ignorant that, independent of the more obvious necessity which you affect to disown, a distinct and unequivocal necessity, of another sort, has been created by the artful conduct of the Queen in turning round upon her accusers with wholesale accusation.

Do you wish, my Lord, to see a sovereign on the throne of these realms who had virtually pleaded guilty to the hideous charges above cited? What would you think of his dignity— nay, of his security-after such a confession? The English Nation might have some cause to canvass its right of resistance, did it behold its Chief Magistrate proclaiming himself “ a foul, tyrannical conspirator, who for years had attempted, by persecution and perjury, to hunt out of life the sharer of his dignity and his bed."

You will, perhaps, inquire what will be the opinion of the conduct of his Majesty and his Minister should the Queen be acquitted? I will inform your Lordship: it need not be the same as that which would ensue should they give up the prosecution already commenced. A law quibble, default of circumstantial evidence, and many other causes, may obtain—as they have obtained-verdicts of acquittal for individuals whose guilt, though not tangible, was too evident. Should a prosecutor abandon a prosecution loudly stigmatized as iniquitous, he would, to all appearance, establish not only an opinion of innocence in favour of the ac

cused, but an acknowledgment of guilt in condemnation of himself.

Again, a train of defensive evidence, that may prove unqualified innocence of the charge, may develope the very just grounds for suspicion on which it was founded. An abandonment of an already instituted prosecution, if that prosecution be subjected to prying odium, would lead to the inference that no such justifitory grounds existed,-therefore, that foul malice was the iniquitous originator—and its glaring detection the summary terminator of the proceeding. Should his Majesty lend himself to the propagation of such an opinion as this respecting the cause at issue between the Nation and its Queen, can you, my Lord-can any one-duly calculate the accession of strength he would be thereby yielding to the enemies of our tranquillity? Cannot the present impious menace and gesture of the times convince you, that were "Parliament prorogued," this faction would attribute to itself the eredit of such an event, and growing bold on the idea of having compelled the abandonment of the prosecution against the Queen, would with more impious me nace and gesture, come forward to demand her