power. It would not, Mr. Burke said, be amiss, if, before they enjoyed the triumph, they shewed their wisdom by endeavouring to preserve the empire. Parliament was not to be resorted to in the event of his majesty's resumption of his power; and he desired to know whether they had asserted the competency of parliament on purpose to degrade and vilify it? The right honourable gentleman thought, that to depose his majesty's government, it was necessary to make an examination of physicians before that House; but to give it to him, it was not necessary for that House to have any examination. The right honourable gentleman asked, what had they to say of the characters of the officers of the household? He had nothing to say of them, but that when they had accepted the trust, they were not fit to hold it. He might adore the Duke of Montague, he might worship the Earl of Salisbury: he knew them, but he would not say that others, as great as they, would not do in their places. The House had no security at all for the due performance of that important act, which was to pass through the hands of the king's council. The right honourable gentleman had said, would you have the king a supplicant to parliament? Yes, he thought parliament the proper judge of kings, and that it was for their honour that they should be so. When he went to war with foreign powers, he wished the king to be a supplicant to parliament: when he entered into subsidiary treaties, he wished him to be a supplicant; but he did not wish him to be a supplicant to his own menial servants, those who eat his bread and received his wages. If an examination of his majesty's physicians, when his incapacity was declared, were a degradation, why did they make it a necessary proceeding? The right honourable gentleman said, if the king is well, he shall come and claim. Why then did he not? Oh no, he must have restraint, but it should be any restraint but that of parliament. Mr. Burke reasoned on the necessary steps to be taken previous to his majesty's being suffered to resume his authority; the first thing to be learnt, he said, was,

that the sanity should not be doubtful. It would prove shockingly reprehensible to produce the person of a monarch, in such weakness as might render him the tool of a faction, who should make him do what he could not undo. Had they forgotten the case of Charles the Sixth of France, who delivered all his power over to the hands of a faction which ruined France? Charles the Sixth, previous to his visitation by that dreadful calamity, was as enterprising as any monarch that ever sat on the throne of France, and just before it pleased Heaven to afflict him, the French had talked of invading England; but after that period, the English invaded France; we went into the heart of the country and tore the crown from the brow of its monarch. Mr. Burke advised the perusal of the history of foreign states, a fund of knowledge infinitely more serviceable than birth-day odes or addresses. The disorder with which the sovereign was afflicted, was, he said, like a vast sea which rolled in, and at a low tide rolled back, and left a bold and barren shore. Mr. Burke said, he had taken pains to make himself master of the subject, he had turned over every book upon it, and had visited the dreadful mansions, where those unfortunate beings were confined. At one of them, the capital hospital for such persons, he saw the goodness of the provisions, the cleanliness of the house, the discipline throughout, and the wonderful order, in consequence of which so many persons were governed by a few. An author of great authority, in mentioning the uncertainty of the symptoms of sanity, had declared, that after having been kept a month, (and the rule was, he said, at all the houses he had visited, though anxious to discharge the patients speedily, to keep them a month after their recovery before they turned them out of the house,) they would sometimes dread the hour of their departure, and relapse on the very last day, and the consequences which had followed, were of the most fatal kind. Mr. Burke read an extract from the volume to which he alluded, which stated, that some of these unfortunate individuals after a supposed recovery,

had committed parricides, others had butchered their sons, others had done violence to themselves by hanging, shooting, drowning, throwing themselves out of window, and by a variety of other ways. [When Mr. Burke read the extract, there was a cry of Oh! Oh! and one gentleman called Order!] Mr. Burke declared, that he wished to preserve the utmost delicacy, but delicacy, though a being of perfect symmetry and order, was only a subsidiary virtue, and ought always to give way to truth, where the case was such, that the truth was infinitely of more consequence than the delicacy. He instanced a variety of cases, where great delicacy was primâ facie due, and yet it was uniformly abandoned. Among others, all cases of illness in the fair sex, who were, he said, even delicacy itself; and yet there occurred with them a variety of occasions, where delicacy was obliged to be sacrificed; he mentioned child-birth, and especially when the child was the heir of a kingdom; in that case, for the sake of the succession, there was still more disregard to delicacy, than in other instances. He also adverted to the proceedings in the two Houses, upon divorce bills, proceedings in the ecclesiastical courts, trials for rapes, and other measures. In Naples, he said, they published every circumstance relative to such maladies as his majesty laboured under, because the feelings of the world superseded delicacy. Had he not seen London almost burnt to the ground through an idle and over scrupulous regard to delicacy? Mr. Burke observed, that he hoped he had read enough to give the committee a sense of the danger of an uncertain cure, and argued from the great disasters which had followed in private life, that it was the more necessary to take care that a sane sovereign was put in the possession of government. He drew a picture of the king's supposed return, which he described as most happy, if really cured, but as horrible in the extreme, in its consequences, if a sudden relapse took place.

The clause was agreed to. On the following day the bill was read a third time, passed, and carried to the House of Lords, where it was read a first and second time without opposition. On the 19th, the lord chancellor, as soon as the peers assembled in order to go into a committee on the bill, informed them, that the improvement of the king's health, already stated in the official reports of the physicians, was still progressive, an intelligence which certainly must prove pleasing to every man in the kingdom; in this situation of things he conceived they could not possibly proceed upon the bill before them, and therefore moved, that their lordships should immediately adjourn to the 24th. On the day appointed, the chancellor informed the House, that he had that morning attended his majesty by his express command, and had found him perfectly recovered: he therefore moved a farther adjournment, which being again repeated, his lordship on the 5th of March informed the peers, that his majesty would signify his farther pleasure to both Houses on Tuesday the 10th of March. Thus ended the necessity and project of a regency.

MR. HASTINGS'S PETITION, COMPLAINING OF WORDS SPOKEN BY MR. BURKE IN WESTMINSTER-HALL.

April 27.

THIS day Major Scott presented a petition from Mr. Hastings to the House of Commons, in which he stated, that Mr. Burke, in supporting the charges exhibited against him at the bar of the House of Lords, had accused him of sundry heinous crimes not laid in the articles of impeachment. He instanced the charge of having been concerned in a plot for assassinating the Shahzada, and in another plot for putting to death the son of Jaffier Ally Cawn; of being accessory to certain horrible cruelties alleged to have been committed by one Debi Sing; and lastly, of having been guilty of the murder of Nundcomar. He therefore prayed the House either to bring forward and prosecute those charges in specific articles,

and thereby give him an opportunity of vindicating his innocence, or to grant him such other redress as to their justice and wisdom might seem fit. A motion being made, that the petition should be brought up, Mr. Pitt and some other members declared themselves for receiving the petition, on the ground that Mr. Hastings, though the object of their accusation, did not cease to be the object of their justice, and therefore ought not to be deprived of the right belonging to every subject, of preferring a petition and stating a grievance to that House.

Mr. BURKE said, that to intreat the candid indulgence of the House was, at that particular moment, whatever it might be upon other occasions, the most distant from his thoughts; because candid indulgence was only to be bestowed where there was error, which he was conscious he had not committed. He desired not to be excused on account of his good intentions, being perfectly satisfied with his own conduct, and at a time of life to look for approbation beyond that of the day-the approbation of a generous posterity. The satisfaction, however, of his own mind, was no reason why others should be satisfied with his conduct; and, as he held it to be a duty which every man owed to a great body to which he belonged, to give a statement of his conduct, he would offer the House an explanation. It never could have been a matter of less difficulty to him to abstain from heat, than it was at present; he felt not the smallest inclination to depart from the bounds of moderation and temper; the prosecution had never been carried on by any heat of his, for enthusiasm, though it might be good at the beginning of a business, vanished like a vapour as the business proceeded, and was soon gone. If after the explanation he was about to give in the plainest phrase, the House should choose to continue him in his trust as a manager, he would persist in the discharge of it, to the best of his abilities; but if, on the other hand, they thought it right to censure and remove him, he would receive it as a personal favour to himself, since it would remove him from an arduous un