Pitt, redoubling contempt, said with a sneer, we once lived in a road of epithets together--hard! that my friend, with whom I have taken sweet council of epithets, should now reproach me with using them! Lyttelton, he said, was a pretty poetical genius: with his pen in his hand, nobody respected him more: but what! were not Billingsgate and Broughton epithets? He at once described Lyttelton as an _innocent_, and would have fixed the use of invectives on him. Sir George terminated the altercation and debate, by protesting it was not his fault if he did not still live in friendship with Mr. Pitt. May 14th.--The Prussian treaty was opened to the House by Sir George Lyttelton. It stipulated that the King of Prussia should pay 61,000_l._ due on the Silesian loan; but admitted that 20,000_l._ was due to him, which the Parliament was desired to grant. Pitt took the convention to pieces, interpreting it as a design in the King of Prussia of returning indignity for indignity; and as derogatory to the sovereignty of England, which was now giving 20,000_l._ to a Monarch, represented as intimidated, for unjust claims, examined and pronounced so, and now allowed by a commission of review, as unheard of as that exercised at Berlin; and founded on admission of damages, by what kind of liquidation could not be guessed. Had that King made a demand, or had this compensation been offered to him? But he saw he said, that all the Powers of Europe were setting up a new jurisprudence, and that we were no longer to enjoy the empire of the ocean. For himself, he should affect no superiority but what was common to him with twelve millions, innocence of his country’s ruin, the superiority of the undone over the undoers. If he could but be told that even by a protest we had secured the rights of our Courts of Admiralty, he would acquiesce; and should be glad, as it would bring the long sufferers on the Silesian loan into their money. Yet he had rather vote them the 60,000_l._: we did not want such a sum; the necessary thing to us was the acknowledgment of the right. So thought the King of Prussia, and said, I will take nothing, to show I set my foot on your neck, and _how_ I am intimidated.--He hoped the Committee would at least couple with the vote the assertion of our rights.