It may easily be imagined what variety of passions were excited by this extraordinary affair. Curiosity to know what black management had left such[77] scruples on the minds of some of the Judges of the Court-Martial, was the common and natural consequence: the very novelty of tools of power sinking under a consciousness of guilt, or under the conviction of having unwittingly been made the tools of power, was sufficient to raise the utmost attention. The few poor well-wishers of the condemned saw a gleam of truth darting upon a prison which they had scarce ventured to incur the odium of approaching--and if there had been such black management (a question scarce admitting an _if_, considering all that had preceded and all that followed) the actors in so dark a tragedy undoubtedly did not feel the most pleasing sensations from the illustration that now seemed unavoidable. The latter description of men appeared to be in danger of changing unpopular situations with the Admiral--they were soon the only satisfied class, the only triumphant--for by the very next day after the Bill had been read in the House of Commons, by Sunday evening it was blazed over the town, that the four sea-officers named by Mr. Keppel disclaimed him, and denied having empowered him to apply in their names. Mr. Pitt was thunderstruck--and well he might: he saw what consequences Fox would draw from this disavowal. Enquiry was made into the truth of the report. Holmes and Geary persisted that they had not commissioned Keppel. Sir Richard Lyttelton, an intimate friend of the latter, applied to him, and, as Sir Richard himself told me within an hour after he had seen Geary, begging him to consider the injustice and dishonourableness of retracting what he had authorized Keppel to say; he replied in these very words, “_It will hurt my preferment to tell_.” Can I pass over these words cursorily?--or rather, do they want a comment? What dissertation could express more fully than they do themselves all they contained? Who had power to stop a sea-officer’s preferment? would it hurt his preferment to tell what affected no[78] powerful man with guilt? Did those words imply that he had nothing to tell? As thick a veil as was drawn over the particulars of this transaction, can it be doubted but that particulars there were of a heinous dye? And though Mr. Keppel’s scruples were treated as idle, though it was asserted that he had nothing to tell, though he saw Mr. Byng die, without telling; did not that attention of Geary to his interest supply articulation to Mr. Keppel’s conscience?--a fact that I shall mention presently, when the father[79] of the man whose power Geary dreaded, asked for a day of peculiar significance, will explain and cannot in the nature of things be disjoined from that sagacious captain’s conception of what interests were concerned to impose silence on the Court-Martial.