[Footnote 1:  M. Henault was President of the Parliament of Paris.  His tragedy was “Cornelie.”  He died in 1770, at the age of eighty-six.]

Adieu! though I am very angry with you, I deserve all your friendship, by that I have for you, witness my anger and disappointment.  Yours ever.

P.S.—­Send me your new direction, and tell me when I must begin to use it.

CASE OF WILKES.

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

STRAWBERRY HILL, June 9, 1768.

To send you empty paragraphs when you expect and want news is tantalising, is it not?  Pray agree with me, and then you will allow that I have acted very kindly in not writing till I had something to tell you. Something, of course, means Wilkes, for everything is nothing except the theme of the day.  There has appeared a violent North Briton, addressed to, and written against Lord Mansfield, threatening a rebellion if he continued to persecute Mr. Wilkes.  This paper, they say, Wilkes owned to the Chevalier de Chastelux, a French gentleman, who went to see him in the King’s Bench, and who knew him at Paris.  A rebellion threatened in print is not very terrible.  However, it was said that the paper was outrageous enough to furnish the Law with every handle it could want.  But modern mountains do not degenerate from their ancestors; their issue are still mice.  You know, too, that this agrees with my system, that this is an age of abortions.  Prosecutions were ordered against the publishers and vendors, and there, I suppose, it will end.

Yesterday was fixed for the appearance of Wilkes in Westminster Hall.  The Judges went down by nine in the morning, but the mob had done breakfast still sooner, and was there before them; and as Judges stuffed out with dignity and lamb-skins are not absolute sprites, they had much ado to glide through the crowd.  Wilkes’s counsel argued against the outlawry, and then Lord Mansfield, in a speech of an hour and a half, set it aside; not on their reasons, but on grounds which he had discovered in it himself.  I think they say it was on some flaw in the Christian name of the county, which should not have been Middlesex to wit,—­but I protest I don’t know, for I am here alone, and picked up my intelligence as I walked in our meadows by the river.  You, who may be walking by the Arno, will, perhaps, think there was some timidity in this; but the depths of the Law are wonderful!  So pray don’t make any rash conclusions, but stay till you get better information.

Well! now he is gone to prison again,—­I mean Wilkes; and on Tuesday he is to return to receive sentence on the old guilt of writing, as the Scotch would not call it, the 45,[1] though they call the rebellion so.  The sentence may be imprisonment, fine, or pillory; but as I am still near the Thames, I do not think the latter will be chosen.  Oh! but stay, he may plead against the indictment, and should there be an improper Middlesex