which had rejected him, and insulting, and even in some instances beating, passers-by who refused to join in their cheers for "Wilkes and Liberty."

He had already pledged himself to take the necessary steps to procure the reversal of his outlawry; and, in pursuance of his promise, he surrendered in the Court of King's Bench. But his removal to prison caused a renewal of the tumults with greater violence than before. The mob even rescued him from the officers who had him in custody; and when, having escaped from his deliverers, he, with a parade of obedience to the law, again surrendered himself voluntarily at the gate of the King's Bench Prison, they threatened to attack the jail itself, kindled a fire under its walls, which was not extinguished without some danger, and day after day assembled in such tumultuous and menacing crowds, that at last Lord Weymouth, the Secretary of State, wrote a letter to the Surrey magistrates, enjoining them to abstain from no measures which might seem necessary for the preservation of peace, even if that could only be effected by the employment of the soldiery. The riots grew more and more formidable, till at last the magistrates had no resource but to call out the troops, who, on one occasion, after they had been pelted with large stones, and in many instances severely injured, fired, killing or wounding several of the foremost rioters. So tragical an event seemed to Wilkes to furnish him with exactly such an opportunity as he desired to push himself into farther notoriety. He at once printed Lord Weymouth's letter, and circulated it, with an inflammatory comment, in which he described it as a composition having for its fruit "a horrid massacre, the consummation of a hellish plot deliberately planned." Too angry to be prudent, Lord Weymouth complained to the House of Lords of this publication as a breach of privilege, and the Lords formally represented it to the House of Commons as an insult deliberately offered to them by one of its members. There could be no doubt that such language as Wilkes had used was libellous. In its imputation of designs of deliberate wickedness, it very far exceeded the bitterest passages of The North Briton; and Lord Weymouth's colleagues, therefore, thought they might safely follow the precedent set in 1764, of branding the publication as a libel, and again procuring the expulsion of the libeller from the House of Commons. There were circumstances in the present case, such as the difference between the constituencies of Aylesbury and Middlesex, and the enthusiastic fervor in the offender's cause which the populace of the City had displayed, which made it very doubtful whether the precedent of 1764 were quite a safe one to follow; but the ministers not only disregarded every such consideration, but, as if they had wantonly designed to give their measure a bad appearance, and to furnish its opponents with the strongest additional argument against it, they mixed up with their present complaint a reference to former misdeeds of Wilkes with which it had no connection. On receiving the message of the Lords, they had summoned him to appear at the bar of the House of Commons, that he might be examined on the subject; but this proceeding was so far from intimidating him, that he not only avowed the publication of his comment on Lord Weymouth's letter, but gloried in it, asserting that he deserved the thanks of the people for bringing to light the true character of "that bloody scroll." Such language was regarded as an aggravation of his offence, and the Attorney-general moved that his comment on the letter "was an insolent, scandalous, and seditious libel;" and, when that motion had been carried, Lord Barrington followed it up with another, to the effect that "John Wilkes, Esq., a member of this House, who hath at the bar of this House confessed himself to be the author and publisher of what the House has resolved to be an insolent, scandalous, and seditious libel, and who has been convicted in the Court of King's Bench of having printed and published a seditious libel, and three[11] obscene and impious libels, and by the judgment of the said Court has been sentenced to undergo twenty-two months' imprisonment, and is now in execution under the said judgment, be expelled this House." This motion encountered a vigorous opposition, not only from Mr. Burke and the principal members of the Rockingham party, which now formed the regular Opposition, but also from Mr. Grenville, the former Prime-minister, who on the former occasion, in 1764, had himself moved the expulsion of the same offender. His speech on this occasion is the only one which is fully reported; and it deserved the distinction from the exhaustive way in which it dealt with every part of the question. It displayed no inclination to extenuate Wilkes's present offence, but it pointed out with great force the circumstance that the supporters of the motion were far from agreement as to the reasons by which they were guided; that some members of the greatest authority in the House, while they had avowed their intention of voting for the expulsion, had at the same time been careful to explain that the comment on Lord Weymouth's letter was not the ground of their vote; that so great a lawyer as Mr. Blackstone had asserted that that comment "had not been properly and regularly brought before the House," but had founded his intention to vote for the expulsion solely "upon that article of the charge which related to the three obscene and impious libels mentioned in it, disavowing in the most direct terms all the other articles." That, on the other hand, other members of deserved weight and influence, such as Lord Palmerston and Lord F. Campbell, had disdained the idea of regarding "the article of the three obscene and impious libels as affording any ground for their proceeding." So practised a debater as Mr. Grenville had but little difficulty, therefore, in arguing against the advocates of expulsion, when they were so divided that one portion of them did, in fact, reply to the other. But it would be superfluous here to enter into the arguments employed on either side to justify the expulsion, or to prove it to be unjustifiable, from a consideration of the character of either Wilkes or his publication. The strength and importance of Mr. Grenville's speech lay in the constitutional points which it raised.

Some supporters of the ministers had dwelt upon the former expulsion, insisting that "a man who had been expelled by a former House of Commons could not possibly be deemed a proper person to sit in the present Parliament, unless he had some pardon to plead, or some merit to cancel his former offences." By a reference to the case of Sir R. Walpole, Mr. Grenville proved that this had not been the opinion of former Parliaments; and he contended, with unanswerable logic, that it would be very mischievous to the nation if such a principle should be now acted on, and such a precedent established, since, though employed in the first instance against the odious and the guilty, it might, when once established, be easily applied to, and made use of against, the meritorious and the innocent; and so the most eminent and deserving members of the state, under the color of such an example, by one arbitrary and discretionary vote of one House of Parliament, the worst species of ostracism, might be excluded from the public councils, cut off and proscribed from the rights of every subject of the realm, not for a term of years alone, but forever. He quoted from "L'Esprit des Lois" an assertion of Montesquieu, that "one of the excellences of the English constitution was, that the judicial power was separated from the legislative, and that there would be no liberty if they were blended together; the power over the life and liberty of the citizens would then be arbitrary, for the judge would be the legislator." And, having thus proved that it would be a violation of the recognized