I have mentioned Mr. Grenville’s ingratitude to Lord Bute, which implies preceding obligation. He had owed solely and entirely to Lord Bute the rich reversion of a Tellership of the Exchequer for his son. Lord Bute perhaps thought it was no light additional favour to have made over his power into Mr. Grenville’s hands. But the latter had not forgotten how contemptuously he had been set aside the last year; and, as Lord Bute by no means observed his promise of abstaining from exerting his influence at Court, it is but candid to allow that Lord Bute diminished the favour by not adhering to the terms on which he bestowed it. Be that how it would, Grenville had not sat a month at the Treasury, before, remembering the affront and forgetting the reversion, he set himself by all manner of means to lessen the profits of the other reversion which Lord Bute had procured for his own son. Thus auspiciously commenced the new administration! As soon as it was known that Lord Bute intended to quit, Wilkes had forborne to publish his North Britons; waiting to see the consequences of the change. The tone he had given did not, however, stop. In the City they toasted to Wit, Beauty, Virtue, and Honour, ironic designations of the King, Queen, Princess Dowager, and Lord Bute. The North Briton too was soon resumed, and on the 23rd of April was published the memorable _forty-fifth_ number, which occasioned so much trouble to the author, procured so essential a correction of loose and till then undefined power, and produced so many silly conundrums and wretched witticisms on the number itself.[339] This famous paper gave a flat lie to the King himself, for having, by the Favourite’s suggestion, assumed the honour of obtaining peace for the King of Prussia.[340] Nothing could be more just than the satire, nothing more bold than the unmeasured liberty with which it was uttered.[341] The Prussian monarch must have read with scorn, and Europe with laughter, so absurd a boast as our vaunting to have saved an ally whom we had betrayed and abandoned. Ridicule might have handled this vain-glorious falsehood with full severity and full security, without passing the bounds which law allows. But when Parliament had connived at the treachery, could it be supposed that it would suffer a private hand to wield the bolt which had slept in the custody of so many corrupt representatives? The lie given in print to the Crown, by an obscure man, was an unparalleled license. If the King had a particle of power left, or his servants, or his magistrates, of spirit, such an insult could not be passed over. The rashness of his servants contrived to involve the Crown and themselves in inextricable difficulties, and to make the unwarrantable behaviour of Wilkes appear innocent, when compared with the excesses they committed themselves.