better than its majority deserved, an injustice for which I now
apologize. I did not, however, resist the temptation to hint,
quite good-humoredly, that my politeness to the Committee had
cost me quite enough already, and that I was not prepared to
supply the members of the Committee, or anyone else, with extra
copies merely as collectors' curiosities.


THE COUNCIL OF TEN

Then the fat was in the fire. The majority, chaffed for its
eagerness to obtain copies of scarce pamphlets retailable at five
guineas, went dancing mad. When I presented myself, as requested,
for cross-examination, I found the doors of the Committee room
shut, and the corridors of the House of Lords filled by a
wondering crowd, to whom it had somehow leaked out that something
terrible was happening inside. It could not be another licensed
play too scandalous to be discussed in public, because the
Committee had decided to discuss no more of these examples of the
Censor's notions of purifying the stage; and what else the
Committee might have to discuss that might not be heard by all
the world was not easily guessable.

Without suggesting that the confidence of the Committee was in
any way violated by any of its members further than was
absolutely necessary to clear them from suspicion of complicity
in the scene which followed, I think I may venture to conjecture
what was happening. It was felt by the majority, first, that it
must be cleared at all costs of the imputation of having procured
more than one copy each of my statement, and that one not from