recalled. It was decided by the Great Revolution families,
that they should not be dukes. Infinite was the indignation
of the lay Abbot of Marney. He counted his boroughs,
consulted his cousins, and muttered revenge. The opportunity
soon offered for the gratification of his passion.

The situation of the Venetian party in the wane of the
eighteenth century had become extremely critical. A young
king was making often fruitless, but always energetic,
struggles to emancipate his national royalty from the trammels
of the factious dogeship. More than sixty years of a
government of singular corruption had alienated all hearts
from the oligarchy; never indeed much affected by the great
body of the people. It could no longer be concealed, that by
virtue of a plausible phrase power had been transferred from
the crown to a parliament, the members of which were appointed
by an extremely limited and exclusive class, who owned no
responsibility to the country, who debated and voted in
secret, and who were regularly paid by the small knot of great
families that by this machinery had secured the permanent
possession of the king's treasury. Whiggism was putrescent in
the nostrils of the nation; we were probably on the eve of a
bloodless yet important revolution; when Rockingham, a
virtuous magnifico, alarmed and disgusted, resolved to revive
something of the pristine purity and high-toned energy of the
old whig connection; appealed to his "new generation" from a
degenerate age, arrayed under his banner the generous youth of
the whig families, and was fortunate to enlist in the service
the supreme genius of Edmund Burke.