l. Where is the mark set upon this crime?
where the token by which I should discover it? It has lain concealed
under water; and no human prudence, no human innocence, could save me
from the destruction with which I am at present threatened.

"It is now full two hundred and forty years since treasons were defined;
and so long has it been since any man was touched to this extent upon
this crime before myself. We have lived, my lords, happily to ourselves
at home: we have lived gloriously abroad to the world: let us be content
with what our fathers have left us.*let not our ambition carry us to be
more learned than they were in these killing and destructive arts. Great
wisdom it will be in your lordships, and just providence for yourselves,
for your posterities, for the whole kingdom, to cast from you into the
fire these bloody and mysterious volumes of arbitrary and constructive
treasons, as the primitive Christians did their books of curious arts,
and betake yourselves to the plain letter of the statute, which tells
you where the crime is, and points out to you the path by which you may
avoid it.

"Let us not, to our own destruction, awake those sleeping lions, by
rattling up a company of old records which have lain for so many ages by
the wall, forgotten and neglected. To all my afflictions, add not this,
my lords, the most severe of any; that I, for my other sins, not for my
treasons, be the means of introducing a precedent so pernicious to the
laws and liberties of my native country.

"However, these gentlemen at the bar say they speak for the
commonwealth, and they believe so; yet, under favor, it is I who, in
this particular, speak for the commonwealth. Precedents like those
which are endeavored to be established against me, must draw along such
inconveniencies and miseries, that in a few years the kingdom will be in
the condition expressed in a statute of Henry IV.; and no man shall know
by what rule to govern his words and actions.

"Impose not, my lords, difficulties insurmountable upon ministers of
state, nor disable them from serving with cheerfulness their king and
country. If you examine them, and under such severe penalties, by every
grain, by every little weight, the scrutiny will be intolerable. The
public affairs of the kingdom must be left waste; and no wise man,
who has any honor or fortune to lose, will ever engage himself in such
dreadful, such unknown perils.

"My lords, I have now troubled your