or I never will speak for you again.” As the Opposition had at that time been inconsiderable, this breathed a little more than a mere spirit of obstinacy, and foretold a Bill to be framed not without an interested meaning: at least a legislator is uncommonly zealous for the public good, who forgets the philosophy of his character to drive on his honest ordinances by political menaces! The next day the Committee finished without a division. Sir Richard Lloyd, a Lawyer, who had spoken against the Bill, voted for it afterwards, without assigning any reason for his change of opinion. Captain Saunders, who had said that he would go and vote against the Bill, for the sake of the sailors, having once given forty of his crew leave to go on shore for an hour, and all returned married, was compelled by Lord Anson, the Chancellor’s son-in-law and his patron, to vote for it. Henley and the Solicitor-General declaring of the same words, the one, that they could not be made clearer; the other, that they were as clear as the sun at noonday, though each gave a totally different interpretation of them, were well ridiculed by Fox; as a serious speech of Lord Egmont was with much humour and not a little indecency by Nugent. June 1.--The report was made of the Bill, and the House sat till ten. On one clause only there was a division of 102 to 20. 2d.--A new anti-ministerial Paper appeared, called the Protester, supported at the expense of the Duke of Bedford and Beckford, and written by Ralph, a dull author, originally a poet, and satirized in the Dunciad: retained, after his pen had been rejected by Sir Robert Walpole, by Doddington and Waller; but much fitter to range the obscure ideas of the latter, than to dress up the wit of the former: from them, he devolved to the Prince of Wales in his second opposition, and laboured long in a paper called the Remembrancer, which was more than once emboldened above the undertaker’s pitch, by Lord Egmont and others. Ralph’s own turn seemed to be endeavouring to raise mobs by speculative ideas of government; from whence his judgment at least may be calculated. But he had the good fortune to be bought off from his last Journal, the Protester, for the only Paper that he did not write in it.