"very properly rejecting the bill passed by the Commons declaring
general warrants to be illegal, leaving this question to be decided (as
it was, satisfactorily) by the Courts of Common Law."]

[Footnote 9: From a speech of Mr. Grenville delivered at a later period
(February 3, 1769, "Parliamentary History," xvi., 548), it appears that
the Secretaries of State who signed this general warrant did so against
their own judgment. "They repeatedly proposed to have Wilkes's name
inserted in the warrant of apprehension, but were overruled by the
lawyers and clerks of the office, who insisted that they could not
depart from the long-established precedents and course of proceeding."
And in one of these debates, Mr. Pitt, while denouncing with great
severity Grenville's conduct in procuring the issue of this particular
warrant, was driven to a strange confession of his own inconsistency,
since he was forced to admit that, while Secretary of State, he had
issued more than one general warrant in exactly similar form.]

[Footnote 10: Strange to say, it does not seem absolutely certain that
Wilkes was the author of the "Essay on Woman." Horace Walpole eventually
learned, or believed that he had learned, that the author was a Mr.
Thomas Potter. (See Walpole's "George III.," i., 310; and Cunningham's
"Note on his Correspondence," iv., 126.)]

[Footnote 11: These are the words of the resolution.--_Parliamentary
History_, xvi., 537. But it does not appear what the three libels were.
The "Essay on Woman" was one, the paraphrase of "Veni Creator" was a
second; no third of that character is mentioned.]

[Footnote 12: The last resolution is approved by Mr. Hallam. "If a few
precedents were to determine all controversies of constitutional law, it