Harrington, returned from England, and the storm broke. In the Speech from the Throne he said,

Every audacious attempt to create jealousy between the two Kingdoms, and disunite the affections of His Majesty's common subjects, so closely connected by the same civil and religious interests, must excite the highest indignation in all true lovers of their country.

This declaration prepared the world for what was to follow. There was a union of all parties in a scheme to oppress Lucas; the Courtiers on account of the instructions so publicly given them; those whom he had offended from resentment; one part of the House as the friends of the Aldermen, and the moderate men from fear of being thought to encourage jealousies between the two kingdoms; so that there did not appear one single man who ventured to oppose the torrent against him1. Lucas and his printers were directed to attend before a Committee of the whole House of Commons. He attended next day, but was not allowed to make any statement.

Esdall, the printer of most of the pamphlets, had absconded, and it would have been perhaps impracticable to have proved Lucas was the author of the impugned writings had not the Lord Lieutenant sent to the House by his Secretary, Mr Weston, the very books which Mr Lucas had with his own hand presented to His Excellency.

When these were shown to Lucas he said he "did not imagine the Lord Lieutenant would have given evidence against him." The Committee then ordered him to withdraw.

Sir Richard Cox was one of the most violent of the instigators of these proceedings against Lucas, and on his motion the House of Commons, on 16th October, 1749, resolved:

That the dedication to the King, and the Addresses to the Citizens of Dublin, of which Charles Lucas is the author, contain many paragraphs highly falsely and scandalously reflecting on the Earl of Harrington, the Lord Lieutenant, tending to promote sedition and insurrections, openly to justify the several horrid and bloody rebellions which have been raised in this Kingdom, to create jealousies between His Majesty's subjects; and scandalously and maliciously misrepresenting the proceedings of the present House of Commons.

The House adjudged

That Charles Lucas is an enemy to his country, that he ought to be prosecuted by His Majesty's Attorney General for writing and publishing the said scandalous and seditious libels, and for his violation of the privileges of the Commons he be committed a close prisoner to Newgate.

1 History of the Dublin Election, 1749, pp. 43-46.

Lucas fled the country.

On the 6th November, 1749, an indictment was sent up to the Grand Jury of the City against him and a True Bill was found. The charge of Lord Chief Justice Marlay to the Grand Jury was a remarkable judicial utterance. He denounced Lucas as a

most infamous, inconsiderable and impudent scribbler, who has dared in print to menace His Majesty, has dared most falsely and scandalously to calumniate and traduce both Houses of Parliament, the King's Ministers, Lords Lieutenants, and all Magistrates from the highest to the lowest, nay who has dared to attempt the utter subversion of our Constitution and to bring us into absolute anarchy and confusion. This Imposter, this Seducer, this false Preacher, is already declared an enemy to his country by the Grand Inquest of the Nation. A Libel was always a dangerous offence, but is much more so since the invention of printing, and since printing presses have been so common. And let me observe to you, Gentlemen, that nothing can preserve the Liberty of the Press but an effectual restraint of the Licentiousness of Printing. Exert yourselves, Gentlemen, free us from these insolent libellers, these abandoned printers and publishers, these Jack Straws, Wat Tylers, and Jack Cades of the age1.

Sir Richard Cox, who had thus triumphed over Lucas, had written and published in the year 1731 a remarkable letter to the Duke of Dorset. It drew an appalling picture of the destitution of Ireland caused by the English restrictions on the Irish wool trade and denounced the conduct of the British Parliament and people. It was written by Cox as then an Irish "Patriot." Every sentiment expressed in it had been reversed in his attitude towards Lucas. Very shortly after the proceedings in the Commons and the finding of the True Bill against Lucas, there appeared A Letter To The Citizens of Dublin, inscribed with the legend-"Offences have come, woe to those by whom they came2." It compelled public attention and ran to at least three editions. Its authorship is not disclosed. It bears every indication of being the composition of Burke. It is a scathing exposure of the "Court Patriot." In the perversion and inversion of one of its opening passages, and the mistaken application of it to Lucas instead of to Sir Richard Cox, probably lies the germ of the myth that Bissett had disseminated in 1798 in the following words: Burke, whose principal attention had been directed to more important objects than Scholastic Logic, perceived the noxious tendency of levelling doctrines. He wrote in the same year, 1749, several essays in the style of 1 R.I.Ac., Halliday Pamphlets, 1749. The charge was printed and published with the authority of the Chief Justice.

2 Dublin, Wm. Johnson, 1749, 3rd ed. Trinity College, Dublin, V. I. 40, No. 28. R.I.Ac., Halliday Pamphlets, 1749, vol. 212.

Lucas, imitating it so completely as to deceive the public, pursuing Lucas' principles to consequences obviously resulting from them and at the same time shewing their absurdity and danger. The first literary effort of his mind was an exposure of the absurdity of Democratic innovations.

Compare with this the following passage from the first Letter to the Citizens of Dublin:

The men who lie most open to examination and consequently to censure or applause are those who stile themselves Patriots....They should be narrowly watched lest under an appearance of making us absolutely free they should lull us into security, and then plunge us into absolute slavery. This deceit I have always dreaded from a set of men whom I shall distinguish by the name of Court Patriots.... There is yet an aggravation of this evil, these men are sometimes cursed with abilities, which enable them to diffuse wrong opinions, thereby to infatuate the people; on their infatuation to built corruption; and by corruption to enslave them. Of such men every good subject will be watchful and jealous; his indignation will rouse him to detect their errors and absurdities, and expose the motives and tendency of their actions....

From this motive I was induced to look into the supposed writings of A Cork Surgeon, who now triumphs in his late conquest, I shall use him with the same candour with which he has treated a man by so much greater than himself as Pompey was superior to the slave who butchered him. I shall consider only the pernicious tendency and absurdity of his writings. and deduce all my inferences from his own words.

The pamphlet then makes various excerpts from Cox's The Cork Surgeon's Antidote, and demonstrates with concise and crushing logic the absurdity of the conclusions drawn by the Surgeon from his own premises and exposes his deductions as a tissue of fallacies, contraries and contradictions. This pamphlet, like the Free Briton Letters and The Naked Truth, is altogether exceptional in its style, methods, vision and power, when compared with the production of any other authors in this controversy. It too, it is with confidence submitted, can have been written by no other hand than Edmund Burke's. The reader can judge of it; it is printed in the Appendix. It is of great interest. It touches on the doctrine of Irish dependency; deals with the grievances of the woollen trade restrictions; and the disposal of offices when "Irishmen cannot without difficulty obtain a place worth. a hundred pounds a year in their own country1"; and the false charge against Lucas of being a seditious libeller.

The pamphlet concludes with a denunciation in splendid rhetoric of the fictitious author of the Surgeon's Letter, and with intrepid allusion to Chief Justice Marlay's charge vindicates the Liberty of the Press. 1 See Primate Boulter's Letters, passim.

Thus you see to what difficulties this slanderer has exposed you; It behoves you to wipe away the stain, by fixing a lasting mark of Infamy on his works. Unhappily the fictitious Author denies the brats, the real Author lies concealed: But if a man could be found, who, to promote his private gain, disguised his avarice and vanity under the mask of public virtue; whose affected Patriotism was sapped by the bare appearance of preferment, which has long been held out to his view, and is now within his grasp; who moved by private resentment, carried on a persecution under the colour of public spirit; who appealed to Heaven with uplifted eyes to testify his sincerity, while he committed undisguised injustice: such a man would be capable of publishing all those absurdities, contradictions and slander which I have mentioned, and to such a man I might with justice apply the following lines: ......Thou cold blooded Slave,

Hast thou not spoke like Thunder on my Side?
Been sworn my Friend, bidding me depend

Upon thy Stars, thy Fortune, and thy Strength,
And dost thou now fall over to my Foes?1

My friends you should be alarmed from many quarters, you are told that the Press is dangerous; dangerous to whom? To bad Magistrates, usurping Tyrants, and their slavish Minions; to men whose actions dread the Public Eye, who fear lest Justice should out run Law and they should fall a sacrifice to an incensed People's indignation. The Freedom of the Press is one of the greatest bulwarks of your Liberty, which you should defend with your fortunes and your lives; if you suffer a breach to be made there, Error and Corruption will rush in and overspread the land, your Complaints will be unheard, your Grievances unredressed, and weak and wicked Ministers will blunder the Nation into abject slavery. You are told that a restraint of the Licentiousness will secure the Freedom of the Press; Are our Laws defective, or what Licentiousness has escaped punishment? The bounds of the Freedom and Licentiousness of the Press are delicate, nor can every hot brained man determine them; he who sets new limits to the Press puts shackles on the arms of Liberty and makes one great stride to her destruction. But why should the Press be now restrained? Surely it cannot be because Truth grows offensive to a few, or lest bad men should be checked in their bad career.

Now my fellow-subjects judge by your senses, hear with your own ears, and you will distinguish the shrieking of the Lapwing from the voice of the Turtle. You have seen great vicissitudes; but History furnishes much greater. I have there read that ARISTIDES 2, the best man of his time, was driven from his native country by the violence of party rage, because his virtue was a reproach to his persecutors: I have read that after the death of that great man, whose poverty was the effect of virtue, the gratitude of the People for his many services, heaped all honours on his offspring, and the State, by public decree, became a parent to his children.

Farewel.

1 King John, Act III, sc. I, in Shakespeare "Sworn my soldier." The quotation was probably from memory. 2 Plutarch.

Who could have written these pages but Edmund Burke?1 The final words were a prophecy; strange vicissitudes were seen. The Aristides was recalled, George III pardoned him. He was unanimously elected to represent his native city in the House of Commons that had condemned him as a Public Enemy. The University of Dublin conferred on him the great distinction of the honorary degree of Doctor of Medicine, and educated his sons free of expense. The Corporation pensioned his widow, and one of the finest of Dublin statues was erected to him in the City Hall.

A Second Letter to the Citizens of Dublin, to which is prefixed A Letter to A Member of Parliament, followed shortly. In the preface to the Member of Parliament the author refers to Bolingbroke:

It is the remark, Sir, and a just one, of an eminent statesman, who has long been cut off from the rights and privileges of his native country, that there is a degree of corruption and vice which nothing can check but the great example and superior virtues of a Patriot King. Tho' we should never feel the want of that example I hope we shall never be reduced to depending on that alone. The lustre of a Patriot Prince is undoubtedly great, but alas! we behold it reflected only, and at second hand. But excluding the private man and the Prince, we have Parliaments from whose conduct the people have a right to expect many blessings because they owe them much. Yet Parliaments have been corrupt, and what has been may be, and therefore should be guarded against.

Then follows a striking classification of the Movers and Directors of Corruption, "in whom habit has effaced all traces of virtue, and they are wicked from principle2," and of the human tools and in

1 In Madden's History of Irish Periodical Literature, the story about Burke and Lucas is thus related: "It is remarkable to find two of the earliest specimens of Burke's abilities as a writer were given to the public at the period referred to (1749). One, the pamphlet against Charles Lucas, whom he ridiculed as an imposter pretending to be a patriot, and designated Aristides, though unquestionably a strenuous asserter and sincere and bold vindicator of his country's rights. The other following in letters published also in 1749 against the ablest of all the Liberal writers in the Independent Newspaper press of the period, Henry Brooke, to whom, in mockery it is charitably said of the fluency of his style (occasionally rather diffuse) is given the name of Diabetes." Madden refers to Prior and Peter Burke and says that if they had devoted a little time and research to the discovery of "these nondescript and unnamed pamphlets written by Burke in 1749," they would have rendered a service to literature.

No pamphlet has ever been disclosed in which Burke dealt in mockery of Henry Brooke. In a letter to his old schoolfellow Matthew Smith written immediately after he went to London, Burke writes "I wish you could procure me some anecdotes of Mr Brooke-author of the justly celebrated tragedy of Gustavus Vasa." This is not the tone in which a Satirist of Brooke would write. Brooke was living in Smith's neighbourhood at the time. See the letter post p. 222.

2 See letter Burke to Shackleton, 7th Dec. 1745, ante p. 81. "There are those who do mischief for mischief's sake, and are directly the reverse of those to whose honour it is said, that they love virtue purely for her beauty; these love malice for its deformity.”