In an anonymous pamphlet, betraying its author, as Junius said, by “its personal interests, personal resentments, and above all that wounded spirit, unaccustomed to reproach, and, I hope, not frequently conscious of deserving it,” Blackstone clung tenaciously and almost angrily to his opinion, which he stated even more emphatically than he had done in the House of Commons. There he expressly refrained from saying whether expulsion necessarily involves incapacity; in his reply to “the writer in the public press, who subscribes himself Junius,” he said as expressly that incapacity is the necessary consequence of expulsion. He retracted nothing. Sincere, no doubt, in his belief that it was Wilkes the blasphemer, not Wilkes the demagogue, whom he had helped to expel and incapacitate, he still held that the House of Commons had acted not only legally but wisely. He gave a pledge of his conviction by repairing the omission in his book. In its subsequent editions appears, as if it were a well settled rule, the statement that if a person is made a peer or elected to serve in the House of Commons, the respective Houses of Parliament may upon complaint of any crime in such person, and proof thereof, adjudge him disabled and incapable to sit as a member. His earlier statement of the law, however, was not forgotten, and “the first edition of Dr. Blackstone’s _Commentaries on the Laws of England_” is said to have become a toast at Opposition banquets. Nobody has now any doubt that Blackstone was in the wrong, confounding, as was pointed out at the time, the independence of the several parts of the legislature with the authority of the whole. His tenacity and the prestige of his name gave him the support of his party; but before long, had he lived, he would have suffered the mortification of seeing the House of Commons expunge from its journals all the declarations, orders, and resolutions respecting the election of John Wilkes, Esquire, as “subversive of the rights of the whole body of the electors of this kingdom.”