bitrary mode of
excise. He declared himself that if Bute only intended to retire into
that situation which he held before he took the seals, a situation in
which he dictated to every part of the King's administration, Wilkes
was as ready to combat the new Administration as he had been steady in
his opposition to a single, insolent, incapable, despotic minister.

Any hope that Wilkes may have entertained of a reformation of the
Ministry was dispelled by a talk which he had with Temple and Pitt at
Temple's house, where Temple showed him an early copy of the King's
speech. Wilkes, Pitt, and Temple were entirely in agreement as to the
fatal defects of the speech, and Wilkes went promptly home and wrote
the article which made the forty-fifth number of the _North Briton_
famous.

In itself the number forty-five was no stronger in its utterances than
many of the preceding numbers. If its tone be compared with the tone
of journalistic criticism of ministers or their sovereign less than a
generation later, it seems sober and even mild. Wilkes's article
started with a citation from Cicero: "Genus orationis atrox et {58}
vehemena, cui opponitur genus illud alterum lenitatis et
mansuetudinis." Then came Wilkes's comment on the speech. He was
careful not to criticize directly the King. With a prudence that was
perhaps more ironical than any direct stroke at the sovereign, he
attacked the minister who misled and misrepresented the monarch. "The
King's speech has always been considered by the legislature and by the
public at large as the speech of the minister."

Starting from this understanding, Wilkes went on to stigmatize the
Address as "the most abandoned instance of ministerial effrontery ever
attempted to be imposed upon mankind," and he doubted whether "the
imposition is greater upon the sovereign or on the nation." "Every
friend of his country," the writer declared, "must lament that a prince
of so many great and amiable qualities, whom England truly reveres, can
be brought to give the sanction of his sacred name to the most odious
measures and to the most unjustifiable public declarations from a
throne ever renowned for truth, honor, and unsullied virtue."

The article was not intemperate and it certainly was not unjust. But
when it appeared the King was still new flushed with his idea of his
own personal authority in the State, and the slightest censure of his
policy goaded him into a kind of frenzy. Had Wilke