“[The speech] contains many eloquent predictions, that, should the Bill be enacted, the ruin of liberty and the introduction of despotism would inevitably follow. Yet even Chesterfield owns that ‘he has observed of late a remarkable licentiousness in the stage. In one play very lately acted (Pasquin[3]) the author thought fit to represent the three great professions, religion, physic, and law as inconsistent with common sense; in another (King Charles the First[4]), a most tragical story was brought upon the stage--a catastrophe too recent, too melancholy, and of too solemn a nature, to be heard of anywhere but from the pulpit. How these pieces came to pass unpunished, I do not know.... The Bill, my Lords, may seem to be designed only against the stage; but to me it plainly appears to point somewhere else. It is an arrow that does but glance upon the stage: the mortal wound seems designed against the liberty of the press. By this Bill you prevent a play’s being acted, but you do not prevent it being printed. Therefore if a license should be refused for its being acted, we may depend upon it the play will be printed. It will be printed and published, my Lords, with the refusal, in capital letters, upon the title-page. People are always fond of what is forbidden. _Libri prohibiti_ are, in all countries, diligently and generally sought after. It will be much easier to procure a refusal than it ever was to procure a good house or a good sale; therefore we may expect that plays will be wrote on purpose to have a refusal; this will certainly procure a good house or a good sale. Thus will satires be spread and dispersed through the whole nation; and thus every man in the kingdom may, and probably will, read for sixpence what a few only could have seen acted for half a crown. We shall then be told, What! will you allow an infamous libel to be printed and dispersed, which you will not allow to be acted? If we agree to the Bill now before us, we must, perhaps, next session, agree to a Bill for preventing any plays being printed without a license. Then satires will be wrote by way of novels, secret histories, dialogues, or under some such title; and thereupon we shall be told, What! will you allow an infamous libel to be printed and dispersed, only because it does not bear the title of a play? Thus, my Lords, from the precedent now before us, we shall be induced, nay, we can find no reason for refusing, to lay the press under a general license, and then we may bid adieu to the liberties of Great Britain.’”[5] Of course it is impossible from single passages, even perhaps from single speeches, to infer that he was ever a great orator, but Horace Walpole has declared one of his speeches the finest that he had ever listened to, and, as Lord Mahon justly observes, “Horace Walpole had heard his own father; had heard Pitt; had heard Pulteney; had heard Windham; had heard Carteret; yet he declares in