nst religion itself, the ministers of the
Church of England have appeared as writers upon public measures only to
be the advocates of slavery civil and religious, your Lordship stood
almost alone as the defender of truth and political charity. The names
of levelling prelate, bishop of the Dissenters, which were intended as a
dishonour to your character, were looked upon by your friends--perhaps
by yourself--as an acknowledgment of your possessing an enlarged and
philosophical mind; and like the generals in a neighbouring country, if
it had been equally becoming your profession, you might have adopted, as
an honourable title, a denomination intended as a stigma.

On opening your Appendix, your admirers will naturally expect to find an
impartial statement of the grievances which harass this Nation, and a
sagacious inquiry into the proper modes of redress. They will be
disappointed. Sensible how large a portion of mankind receive opinions
upon authority, I am apprehensive lest the doctrines which they will
there find should derive a weight from your name to which they are by no
means intrinsically entitled. I will therefore examine what you have
advanced, from a hope of being able to do away any impression left on
the minds of such as may be liable to confound with argument a strong
prepossession for your Lordship's talents, experience, and virtues.

Before I take notice of what you appear to have laid down as principles,
it may not be improper to advert to some incidental opinions found at
the commencement of your political confession of faith.

At a period big with the fate of the human race I am sorry that you
attach so much importance to the personal sufferings of the late royal
martyr, and that an anxiety for the issue of the present convulsions
should not have prevented you from joining in the idle cry of modish
lamentation which has resounded from the Court to the cottage. You wish
it to be supposed you are one of those who are unpersuaded of the guilt
of Louis XVI. If you had attended to the history of the French
Revolution as minutely as its importance demands, so far from stopping
to bewail his death, you would rather have regretted that the blind
fondness of his people had placed a human being in that monstrous
situation which rendered him unaccountable before a human tribunal. A
bishop, a man of philosophy and humanity[15] as distinguished as your
Lordship, declared at the opening of the National Convention--a