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