Let the present house of commons be cashiered, and let the common council of the city of London be placed at St. Stephen’s chapel in their room.  These your lordship will find a much more worthy and manageable set of people, than the representatives of the nation at large.  And can any sensible man doubt for a moment, which are the most respectable body of men?  Examine their persons.  Among their predecessors I see many poor, lank, shrivelled, half-starved things, some bald, some with a few straggling hairs, and some with an enormous bag, pendant from no hair at all.  Turn, my lord, to the other side.  There you will see a good, comely, creditable race of people.  They look like brothers.  As their size and figure are the same, so by the fire in their eyes, and the expression in their countenances, you could scarcely know one of them from another.  Their very gowns are enough to strike terror into the most inattentive.  Each of them covers his cranium with a venerable periwig, whose flowing curls and voluminous frizure bespeak wealth and contentment.  Their faces are buxom, and their cheeks are florid.

You will also, my lord, find them much more easy and tractable, than the squeamish, fretful, discontented wretches, with which other ministers have had to do.  There is but one expence that will be requisite.  It is uniform, and capable of an easy calculation.  In any great and trying question, I was going to say debate, but debates, I am apt to think, would not be very frequent, or very animated,—­your lordship has nothing to do, but to clear the table of the rolls and parchments, with which it is generally covered, and spreading a table cloth, place upon it half a score immense turtles, smoking hot, and larded with green fat.  My lord, I will forfeit my head, if with this perfume regaling their nostrils, a single man has resolution enough to divide the house, or to declare his discontent with any of the measures of government, by going out into the lobby.

So much, my lord, for this scheme.  It is too considerable to be adopted without deliberation; it is too important, and too plausible, to be rejected without examination.  The only remaining hypothesis is that of a dissolution.  Much, I know, may be said against this measure; but, for my own part, next to the new and original system I have had the honour of opening to your lordship, it is with me a considerable favourite.  Those, whose interests it is to raise an outcry against it, will exclaim, “What, for the petty and sinister purposes of ambition, shall the whole nation be thrown into uproar and confusion?  Who is it that complains of the present house of parliament?  Is the voice of the people raised against it?  Do petitions come up from every quarter of the kingdom, as they did, to no purpose, a few years ago, for its dissolution?  But it is the prerogative of the king to dissolve his parliament.  And because it is his prerogative, because he has a power of this