indeclinables of a court calendar, to detach a commis from this department, and to fix a clerk in that, burthen after burthen has been heaped upon the shoulders of a callous and lethargic people.—­But no man can say, that the earl of Shelburne has been idle.  Beside all this, he has restored peace to his country.  His merits in this business, have already been sufficiently agitated.  To examine them afresh would lead me too far from the scope of my subject.  I will not therefore now detain myself either to exculpate or criminate the minister, to whom, whatever they are, they are principally to be ascribed.

From the considerations already suggested, I am afraid thus much may be fairly inferred, that the earl of Shelburne is a man, dark, insidious and inexplicit in his designs; no decided friend of the privileges of the people; and in both respects a person very improper to conduct the affairs of this country.  I would hope however, that the celebrated character given of him by the late lord Holland was somewhat too severe.  “I have met with many, who by perseverance and labour have made themselves Jesuits; it is peculiar to this man to have been born one.”

Such then is the estimate we are compelled to form of a man who in his professions has sometimes gone as far, as the most zealous votaries of liberty.  And what is the inference we shall draw from this?  Shall we, for the sake of one man so specious and plausible, learn to think the language of all men equally empty and deceitful?  Having once been betrayed, shall we avoid all future risk, by treating every pretender to patriotism and public spirit, as a knave and an impostor?  This indeed is a conclusion to which the unprincipled and the vicious are ever propense.  They judge of their fellows by themselves, and from the depravity of their own hearts are willing to infer, that every honesty has its price.  But the very motive that inclines the depraved to such a mode of reasoning, must, upon the very same account, deter the man of virtue from adopting it.  Virtue is originally ever simple and unsuspecting.  Conscious to its own rectitude, and the integrity of its professions, it naturally expects the same species of conduct from others.  By every disappointment of this kind, it is mortified and humbled.  Long, very long must it have been baffled, and countless must have been its mortifications, ere it can be induced to adopt a principle of general mistrust.  And that such a principle should have so large a spread among persons, whose honesty, candour forbids us to suspect, is surely, of all the paradoxe upon the face of the earth, incomparably the greatest.—­The man of virtue then will be willing, before he gives up all our political connexions without distinction, to go along with me to the review of the only one that yet remains to be examined, that of the late marquis of Rockingham.