who is the person for whom you and others are engaged, or whether there be more candidates from that side, than one.  You tell me nothing of either, and I never thought it worth the question to anybody else.  But, in so weighty an affair, and against your judgment, I cannot look upon you as irrevocably determined.  Therefore I desire you will give me leave to reason with you a little upon the subject, lest your compliance, or inadvertency, should put you upon what you may have cause to repent as long as you live.

You know very well, the great business of the high-flying Whigs, at this juncture, is to endeavour a repeal of the test clause.  You know likewise that the moderate men, both of High and Low Church, profess to be wholly averse from this design, as thinking it beneath the policy of common gardeners to cut down the only hedge that shelters from the north.[3] Now, I will put the case; If the person to whom you have promised your vote be one of whom you have the least apprehension that he will promote or assent to the repealing of that clause, whether it be decent or proper, he should be the mouth of an assembly, whereof a very great majority pretend to abhor his opinion.  Can a body, whose mouth and heart must go so contrary ways, ever act with sincerity, or hardly with consistence?  Such a man is no proper vehicle to retain or convey the sense of the House, which, in so many points of the greatest moment, will be directly contrary to his; ’tis full as absurd, as to prefer a man to a bishopric who denies revealed religion.  But it may possibly be a great deal worse.  What if the person you design to vote into that important post, should not only be a declared enemy of the sacramental test, but should prove to be a solicitor, an encourager, or even a penner of addresses to complain of it?  Do you think it so indifferent a thing, that a promise of course, the effect of compliance, importunity, shame of refusing, or any the like motive, shall oblige you past the power of retracting?

Perhaps you will tell me, as some have already had the weakness to do, that it is of little importance to either party to have a Speaker of their side, his business being only to take the sense of the House and report it, that you often, at committees, put an able speaker into the chair on purpose to prevent him from stopping a bill.  Why, if it were no more than this, I believe I should hardly choose, even among my footmen, such a one to deliver a message, whose interest and opinions led him to wish it might miscarry.  But I remember to have heard old Colonel Birch[4] of Herefordshire say, that “he was a very sorry Speaker, whose single vote was not better than fifty common ones.”  I am sure it is reckoned in England the first great test of the prevalency of either party in the House.  Sir Thomas Littleton[5] thought, that a House of Commons with a stinking breath (supposing the Speaker to be the mouth) would go near to infect everything within the walls, and a great