pped the capital in flames. If you have read history,
you know that the projectors of the _exclusion bill_ found the profligacy
of Titus Oates quite sufficient to raise an enormous ferment throughout the
nation, and to procure the legal murder of twenty harmless Jesuits,
gentlemen and priests. You distinctly disclaim the {265} merit of novelty.
Right: you dare not deviate an inch from the old beaten track of
inflammatory calumny and defamation. Your whole tale has been long prepared
and fashioned to your hands. Nothing in it is yours, but the
inconsistencies, contradictions, and scurrilous language, with which you
have pieced it together. It is copied from one or more of the ten thousand
libels, which overspread Europe fifty years ago, when the confederate
ministers of the catholic courts, the Pombals, the Choiseuls, the Arandas,
the Tanuccis, the Caunitzes, the Spinellis, the Marefoschis, &c. had
finally determined to assassinate the whole body of the Jesuits. I have
read almost every word of your two flimsy columns in the old
_Requisitoires_, _Comptes Rendus_, and _Arrets_ of the French parliaments,
from which I traced it to the Jansenists, to the Calvinists, to the _Tuba
Magna_, to Scioppius, to Hospinian, to the _Monarchia Solipsorum_, and to
the lying _Monita Secreta_: yet this last is the only one of your foul
sources, that you have the hardiness to cite, probably because you know it
to be {266} the most malicious. It shall be specially noticed hereafter.
Now all this was long ago refuted to the satisfaction of dispassionate men:
even many of the French parliamentarians saw cause to regret their own
deed. I have heard several of their leading men lament it, and some of them
fairly acknowledge the _infamy_ of the slander, which their courts had
employed to effect it. _Il falloit_ denigrer _les Jesuites; car sans cela,
les parlemens n'en seroient jamais venus a bout_, were the words used by
the late amiable and learned president Des Brosses in my hearing. But you,
Sir, are not content to suck in the black bile of the old Gallic
magistrates; you emulate the savage cruelty of Nero towards the primitive
Christians--you dress up your Jesuits in the semblance of wild beasts, to
entice your dogs to devour them.

And could you not, then, see the inconsistency of representing the whole
body of Jesuits, as men systematically trained to every vice and crime, and
of acknowledging, at the same time, {267} that they governed the