come from the King, who had restored Sir Henry Erskine. He had made, he said, a declaration that he was attached to no party, yet that allegiance, it seemed, had not been thought sufficient. He concluded with strongly exhorting his brother officers not to be made slaves--he might as well have called on the Bishops. This debate was doubly mortifying to the Ministers, who were at once so rudely tasked by the Opposition, and unsupported by every man of the Favourite’s faction--a tacit method of disavowing them; and an encouragement to those who might be tempted to oppose them. On the 26th Mr. Chaworth, a private gentleman of fair character, was killed at a tavern by Lord Byron in a duel, to which the latter had been driven by the undisguised contempt with which the former had treated his want of honour and spirit at a club where they had just dined together. Lord Byron was formally tried by his Peers,[50] and escaped punishment, in consideration of the provocation he had received. On the 29th the question of General Warrants was again renewed in the House of Commons by Sir William Meredith,[51] more agreeably, indeed, to principle than to prudence. I had endeavoured to divert the attempt and had the concurrence of the Lord Chief Justice Pratt’s opinion, we both apprehending, from the great diminution of our party since the preceding winter, that, as we should make a much more inconsiderable figure on a division in Parliament than we had done before on the same question, the merits of the cause would suffer more from that defeat than we should gain by reviving the memory of it. Though the event in the House proved what we had foreseen, we found, however, strength enough to support a battle till between four and five in the morning. Sir W. Meredith, with great force and severity, exposed the conduct of Lord Halifax, who shamefully to that hour (and indeed for some years afterwards) defeated all prosecutions against him at Wilkes’s suit, by standing on the privilege of his peerage. If they, said Sir William, who issued the warrants, had put themselves on the justice of their country, it would have alleviated their guilt; but _while the privilege of the House of Commons was given up, the privilege of the other House had interfered to stop justice_. He then moved that _General Warrants were not consonant to law or to the liberty of the subject_; and in a second question, _if against a Member_. Lord Strafford himself, he said, had issued but one, had pleaded that it was according to practice, and yet had recalled it. Charles II. had applied to Parliament for leave to do it by the Licensing Act. Application had been made in King William’s reign to renew that act, but it was refused. Some said the illegality was decided by the law; others that it was not. Some would say that the House of Commons was not to declare what was law. Who could bring it to an issue? Dryden Leach and other printers were ruined, and could not carry on the suit! Wilkes expelled,