have systematically put down, and forcibly prevented from delivering his
sentiments, every person that was not one of their own gang; who, with
coarse, vulgar, beastly hootings and yellings, have driven every honest
public man from their bacchanalian carousals at the Crown and Anchor;
this set of dirty underlings I have most narrowly watched, year after
year, during a long period; and, as I know all their tricks and
shufflings, I will faithfully lay them before the public, as I proceed
in my Memoirs. The ramifications of the mischief they have done, have
spread far and near. They have kept up a correspondence with some of
the most patriotic individuals in every principal town and city in the
kingdom; by which means they have frequently exercised the power which
they thus acquire, of stifling those sparks of popular fervour, that
would have long since kindled into an irrepressible blaze of patriotism,
had it not been for the sinister exertions of this foul extinguisher of
every particle of generous public liberty, that did not tend to promote
their own base and selfish ends; always acting, as they have done, under
the direction and immediate influence of their Grand Lama, or principal
juggler, Sir Francis Burdett, in whose pay they have most of them
been, directly or indirectly, for many years past. Unable to answer my
arguments, and dreading the exposure of their hero's trickery, this
gang, with a broad faced, impudent individual, of the name of Adams, a
currier, in Drury Lane, at their head, whenever I offered to address
them in public, have been always foremost in the cry of, "Hunt, you
turned your wife out of doors to starve;" and not satisfied with this,
these despicable wretches have worn the heels of their shoes off, in
running from door to door, and from pot-house to pot-house, to vilify me
behind my back, propagating the most bare-faced falsehoods, all of their
own fabrication. I will, by-and-bye, give the reader a specimen of one
of the stories invented by this Adams, and related to Mr. Cobbett by
the man himself, when he was confined in Newgate, in the year 1812; all