You tell us, indeed, that it was not part of your plan to specify any temporary incapacity, and that you could not, without a spirit of prophecy, have specified the disability of a private individual, subsequent to the period at which you wrote. What your plan was, I know not; but what it should have been, in order to complete the work you have given us, is by no means difficult to determine. The incapacity, which you call temporary, may continue seven years; and though you might not have foreseen the particular case of Mr. Wilkes, you might and should have foreseen the possibility of such a case, and told us how far the house of commons were authorized to proceed in it by the law and custom of parliament. The freeholders of Middlesex would then have known what they had to trust to, and would never have returned Mr. Wilkes, when colonel Luttrell was a candidate against him. They would have chosen some indifferent person, rather than submit to be represented by the object of their contempt and detestation.
Your attempt to distinguish between disabilities, which affect whole classes of men, and those which affect individuals only, is really
