" It is a large one,
indeed; and we all may run, God knows where, in chase of glory, over the
boundless expanse of that wild heath whose horizon always flies before
us. I assure his Grace, (if he will yet give me leave to call him so,)
whatever may be said on the authority of the clubs or of the bar, that
Citizen Paine (who, they will have it, hunts with me in couples, and who
only moves as I drag him along) has a sufficient 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.
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