You have seen, that, when he takes two hundred pounds a day for his
entertainment, he tells you that in this very act he is starving
fourteen hundred of the ancient nobility and gentry. My Lords, you have
the blood of nobles,--if not, you have the blood of men in your veins:
you feel as nobles, you feel as men. What would you say to a cruel Mogul
exactor, by whom after having been driven from your estates, driven from
the noble offices, civil and military, which you hold, driven from your
bishoprics, driven from your places at court, driven from your offices
as judges, and, after having been reduced to a miserable flock of
pensioners, your very pensions were at last wrested from your mouths,
and who, though at the very time when those pensions were wrested from
you he declares them to have been the only bread of a miserable decayed
nobility, takes himself two hundred pounds a day for his entertainment,
and continues it till it amounts to sixteen thousand pounds? I do
think, that, of all the corruptions which he has not owned, but has not
denied, or of those which he does in effect own, and of which he brings
forward the evidence himself, the taking and claiming under color of an
entertainment is ten times the most nefarious.
I shall this day only further trouble your Lordships to observe that he
has never directly denied this transaction. I have tumbled over the
records, I have looked at every part, to see whether he denies it.
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