The scope of the bill being now disclosed, it was incumbent on our party to fix on the measures they would pursue with regard to it. We had accordingly a meeting of the chiefs, at the Duke of Newcastle’s, on the 25th. I found the young men warm against the bill, and full of the idea that it was solely calculated to re-establish the empire of the Princess and the Favourite. They neither knew, nor would listen, to the state of factions in the Court. I told them they were doing the business of the Ministers, who wished for nothing so much as a vigorous opposition to the bill. The only answer I could obtain was, they should lose their characters if they did not oppose. If they did oppose the bill, I thought nothing more likely than that the Ministers should recover the ground they had lost in the closet, by supporting the very bill that they were instigating us to oppose. Nay, in the warmth of debate, the passions of the Ministers themselves might grow heated; and, as men are always most angry with those from whom they have received the latest offence, the Ministers, if roughly attacked as the agents of Lord Bute, might again become so; and he would certainly resent less from those who should carry through his bill, than from those whose enmity was inveterate and unalterable. At best, Grenville and his faction would have leisure to carry on the war against the Favourite, while they saw him and the Opposition grow daily more inveterate. My arguments were all in vain. The _listlessness_ of the party was now converted into blind zeal: and a direct opportunity of reviling the Princess and Lord Bute seemed already to those warm young men a triumph over them. As we parted, I told Lord John Cavendish that I thought it much more for the interest of our country to break the Ministry, than to oppose a single bill; “but,” said I, “there is not a trap the Ministers set for you, but what you fall into”--words that soon proved to be prophetic.