could influence the proceedings in Parliament in favour of those who should be accused.  Left to its own movement, it was much more proper to quicken than slacken the prosecutions; and who was there to guide its motions?  The Tories who had been true to one another to the last were a handful, and no great vigour could be expected from them.  The Whimsicals, disappointed of the figure which they hoped to make, began, indeed, to join their old friends.  One of the principal amongst them was so very good as to confess to me that if the Court had called the servants of the late Queen to account, and had stopped there, he must have considered himself as a judge, and have acted according to his conscience on what should have appeared to him; but that war had been declared to the whole Tory party, and that now the state of things was altered.  This discourse needed no commentary, and proved to me that I had never erred in the judgment I made of this set of men.  Could I then resolve to be obliged to them, or to suffer with Oxford?  As much as I still was heated by the disputes in which I had been all my life engaged against the Whigs, I would sooner have chose to owe my security to their indulgence than to the assistance of the Whimsicals; but I thought banishment, with all her train of evils, preferable to either.  I abhorred Oxford to that degree that I could not bear to be joined with him in any case.  Nothing, perhaps, contributed so much to determine me as this sentiment.  A sense of honour would not have permitted me to distinguish between his case and mine own; and it was worse than death to lie under the necessity of making them the same, and of taking measures in concert with him.

I am now come to the time at which I left England, and have finished the first part of that deduction of facts which I proposed to lay before you.  I am hopeful that you will not think it altogether tedious or unnecessary; for although very little of what I have said can be new to you, yet this summary account will enable you with greater ease to recall to your memory the passages of those four years wherewith all that I am going to relate to you has an immediate and necessary connection.

In what has been said I am far from making my own panegyric.  I had not in those days so much merit as was ascribed to me, nor since that time have I had so little as the same persons allowed me.  I committed, without dispute, many faults, and a greater man than I can pretend to be, constituted in the same circumstances, would not have kept clear of all; but with respect to the Tories I committed none.  I carried the point of party honour to the height, and specified everything to my attachment to them during this period of time.  Let us now examine whether I have done so during the rest.