. It was decided
by the Great Revolution families, that they should not be dukes.
Infinite was the indignation of the lay Abbot of Marney. He counted his
boroughs, consulted his cousins, and muttered revenge. The opportunity
soon offered for the gratification of his passion.

The situation of the Venetian party in the wane of the eighteenth
century had become extremely critical. A young king was making often
fruitless, but always energetic, struggles to emancipate his national
royalty from the trammels of the factious dogeship. More than sixty
years of a government of singular corruption had alienated all hearts
from the oligarchy; never indeed much affected by the great body of the
people. It could no longer be concealed, that by virtue of a plausible
phrase power had been transferred from the crown to a parliament, the
members of which were appointed by an extremely limited and exclusive
class, who owned no responsibility to the country, who debated and
voted in secret, and who were regularly paid by the small knot of great
families that by this machinery had secured the permanent possession
of the king's treasury. Whiggism was putrescent in the nostrils of
the nation; we were probably on the eve of a bloodless yet important
revolution; when Rockingham, a virtuous magnifico, alarmed and
disgusted, resolved to revive something of the pristine purity and
high-toned energy of the old whig connection; appealed to his "new
generation" from a degenerate age, arrayed under his banner the generous
youth of the whig families, and was fortunate to enlist in the service
the supreme genius of Edmund Burke.

Burke effected for the whigs what Bolingbroke in a preceding age had
done for the tories: he restored the moral existence of the party. He
taught them to recur to the ancient principles of their connection,
and suffused those principles with all the delusive splendour of his
imagination. He raised the tone of their public discourse; he breathed
a high spirit into their public acts. It was in his power to do more for
the whigs than St John could do for his party. The oligarchy, who had
found it convenient to attaint Bolingbroke for being the avowed
minister of the English Prince with whom they were always in secret
communication, when opinion forced them to consent to his
restitution, had tacked to the amnesty a clause as cowardly as it was
unconstitutional, and declared his incompetence to sit in the parliament
of his countr