for political offences, which had flagged since the acquittal of Hardy, Home Tooke, and Thelwall in 1794. The Government even thought of flying at higher game and of prosecuting the leaders of the Opposition. So feeble however had the Opposition become, that in the House of Commons their numbers frequently sunk as low as 30, and when on the 13th May 1797 the Duke of Bedford brought forward a motion for the dismissal of Ministers in the House of Lords which Lord Lansdowne supported in a vigorous speech, he was hardly able to muster a dozen votes to support it. A party so feeble was perhaps hardly worth prosecuting.
There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous. Having decided not to prosecute the leaders of the Opposition, the supporters of the Government fell upon the printers and proprietors of the Morning Chronicle for a breach of the privileges of the House of Lords. On the 21st March 1798 Lord Minto rose in his place to complain of the following paragraph which had appeared in that journal two days before.
The House of Lords must now be admitted to be highly important as a political assembly, notwithstanding it has of late appeared to be nothing more than a chamber where the minister's edicts are registered for form's sake. Some of their Lordships are determined to vindicate their importance. It is there that the dresses of the Opera dancers are regulated! One of the Roman Emperors recommended to the Senate, when they were good for nothing else, to discuss what was the best sauce for a turbot. To regulate the length of a petticoat is a much more genteel employment.[1]
It was resolved that the above paragraph was a gross and scandalous libel. Mr. John Lambert and Mr. Perry were fined £50 each and committed to Newgate for three months, and several Peers expressed in solemn words their horror at this scandalous publication; horror which was much increased, when Lord Lansdowne rose and said, that to his mind the matter was too trivial to be worthy of their attention, that the
- ↑ Parliamentary History, xxxiii. 1310.
