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 with their consecrated axes.
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