Note 273 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS; (continued 2)

He has described this intercourse of his enemies at court with the king, where, when this punishment was suggested, “a generous personage, altogether unknown to me, being present, bravely and frankly interposed, saying, that ‘whatever I was, I was a Roman; that Englishmen were not so precipitously to be condemned to so exemplary a punishment; that representing that book to be a libel against the king was too remote a consequence to be admitted of in a nation free-born, and governed by laws, and tender of ill precedents.’” It was a noble speech, in the relaxed politics of the court of Charles II. He who made it deserved to have had his name more explicitly told: he is designated as “that excellent Englishman, the great ornament of this age, nation, and House of Commons; he whose single worth balanceth much of the debaucheries, follies, and impertinences of the kingdom.”—A Reply unto the Letter written to Mr. Henry Stubbe, Oxford, 1671, p. 20.