icient activity in his own
native benevolence to dispose and enable him to take the lead for
himself. He is ready to blaspheme his God, to insult his king, and to
libel the Constitution of his country, without any provocation from me
or any encouragement from his Grace. I assure him that I shall not be
guilty of the injustice of charging Mr. Paine's next work against
religion and human society upon his Grace's excellent speech in the
House of Lords. I farther assure this noble Duke that I neither
encouraged nor provoked that worthy citizen to seek for plenty, liberty,
safety, justice, or lenity, in the famine, in the prisons, in the
decrees of Convention, in the revolutionary tribunal, and in the
guillotine of Paris, rather than quietly to take up with what he could
find in the glutted markets, the unbarricadoed streets, the drowsy Old
Bailey judges, or, at worst, the airy, wholesome pillory of Old England.
The choice of country was his own taste. The writings were the effects
of his own zeal. In spite of his friend Dr. Priestley, he was a free
agent. I admit, indeed, that my praises of the British government,
loaded with all its incumbrances, clogged with its peers and its beef,
its parsons and its pudding, its commons and its beer, and its dull
slavish liberty of going about just as one pleases, had something to
provoke a jockey of Norfolk,[14] who was inspired with the resolute
ambition of becoming a citizen of France, to do something which might
render him worthy of naturalization in that grand asylum of persecuted
merit, something which should entitle him to a place in the senate of
the adoptive country of all the gallant, generous, and humane. This, I
say, was possible. But the truth is, (with great deference to his Grace
I say it,) Citizen Paine acted without any provocation at all; he acted
solely from the native impulses of his own excellent heart.

His Grace, like an able orator, as he is, begins with giving me a great
deal of praise for talents which I do not possess. He does this to
entitle himself, on the credit of this gratuitous kindness, to
exaggerate my abuse of the parts which his bounty, and not that of
Nature, has bestowed upon me. In this, too, he has condescended to copy
Mr. Erskine. These priests (I hope they will excuse me, I mean priests
of the Rights of Man) begin by crowning me with their flowers and their
fillets, and bedewing me with their odors, as a preface to their
knocking me on the head