issued a new number of The North Briton (No. 45), in which he heaped unmeasured sarcasm and invective on the peace itself, on the royal speech, and on the minister who had composed it.  As if conscious that Mr. Grenville was less inclined by temper than Lord Bute to suffer such attacks without endeavoring to retaliate, he took especial pains to keep within the law in his strictures, and, accordingly, carefully avoided saying a disrespectful word of the King himself, whom he described as “a prince of many great and amiable qualities,” “ever renowned for truth, honor, and unsullied virtue.”  But he claimed a right to canvass the speech “with the utmost freedom,” since “it had always been considered by the Legislature and by the public at large as the speech of the minister.”  And he kept this distinction carefully in view through the whole number.  The speech he denounced with bitter vehemence, as “an abandoned instance of ministerial effrontery,” as containing “the most unjustifiable public declarations” and “infamous fallacies.”  The peace he affirmed to be “such as had drawn down the contempt of mankind on our wretched negotiators.”  And he described the present minister as a mere tool of “the favorite,” by whom “he still meditated to rule the kingdom with a rod of iron.”  But in the whole number there was but one sentence which could be represented as implying the very slightest censure on the King himself, and even that was qualified by a personal eulogy.  “The King of England,” it said, “is not only the first magistrate of the country, but is invested by the law with the whole executive power.  He is, however, responsible to his people for the due execution of the royal functions in the choice of ministers, etc., equally with the meanest of his subjects in his particular duty.  The personal character of our present amiable sovereign makes us easy and happy that so great a power is lodged in such hands; but the favorite has given too just cause for him to escape the general odium.  The prerogative of the crown is to exert the constitutional power intrusted to it in such a way, not of blind favor and partiality, but of wisdom and judgment.  This is the spirit of our constitution.  The people, too, have their prerogative; and I hope the fine words of Dryden will be engraven on our hearts, ’Freedom is the English subject’s prerogative.’”

These were the last sentences of No. 45.  And in the present day it will hardly be thought that, however severe or even violent some of the epithets with which certain sentences of the royal speech were assailed may have been, the language exceeds the bounds of allowable political criticism.  With respect to the King, indeed, however accompanied with personal compliments to himself those strictures may have been, it may be admitted that in asserting any responsibility whatever to the people on the part of the sovereign, even for the choice of his ministers, as being bound to exercise that choice “with wisdom and judgment,”