ho, supposing they had the power of dispensing with an act of
Parliament, or licensing bribery at their pleasure, might have been
thereby enabled to say, "Here you ought to have received it,--there it
might be oppressive and of dreadful example."

I have only to state, that, in this letter, which was pretended to be
written on the 22d of May, 1782, your Lordships will observe that he
thinks it his absolute duty (and I wish to press this upon your
Lordships, because it will be necessary in a comparison which I shall
have hereafter to make) to lay open all their affairs to them, to give
them a full and candid explanation of his conduct, which he afterwards
confesses he is not able to do. The paragraph has been just read to you.
It amounts to this: "I have taken many bribes,--have falsified your
accounts,--have reversed the principle of them in my own favor; I now
discover to you all these my frauds, and think myself entitled to your
confidence upon this occasion." Now all the principles of diffidence,
all the principles of distrust, nay, more, all the principles upon which
a man may be convicted of premeditated fraud, and deserve the severest
punishment, are to be found in this case, in which he says he holds
himself to be entitled to their confidence and trust. If any of your
Lordships had a steward who told you he had lent you your own money, and
had taken bonds from you for it, and if he afterwards told you that that
money was neither yours nor his, but extorted from your tenants by some
scandalous means, I should be glad to know what your Lordships would
think of such a steward, who should say, "I will take the freedom to
add, that I think myself, on such a subject, on such an occasion,
entitled to your confidence and trust." You will observe his cavalier
mode of expression. Instead of his exhibiting the rigor and severity of
an accountant and a book-keeper, you would think that he had been a
reader of sentimental letters; there is such an air of a novel running
through the whole, that it adds to the ridicule and nausea of it: it is
an oxymel of squills; there is something to strike you with horror for
the villany of it, something to strike you with contempt for the fraud
of it, and something to strike you with utter disgust for the vile and
bad taste with which all these base ingredients are assorted.

Your Lordships will see, when the account which is subjoined to this
unaccountable letter comes before you, that, th