[Footnote 17: This was for the publication of "A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures." [T.S.]]
I allow this gentleman's advice to have been good, and his observations just, and in one respect my condition is worse than that of the Jew, for no recantation will save me. However it should seem by some late proceedings, that my state is not altogether deplorable. This I can impute to nothing but the steadiness of two impartial grand juries, which hath confirmed in me an opinion I have long entertained, that, as philosophers say, "virtue is seated in the middle," so in another sense, the little virtue left in the world is chiefly to be found among the middle rank of mankind, who are neither allured out of her paths by ambition, nor driven by poverty.
Since the proclamation occasioned by my last letter, and a due preparation for proceeding against me in a court of justice, there have been two printed papers clandestinely spread about, whereof no man is able to trace the original further than by conjecture, which with its usual charity lays them to my account. The former is entitled, "Seasonable Advice,"[18] and appears to have been intended for information of the grand jury, upon the supposition of a bill to be prepared against that letter. The other[19] is an extract from a printed book of Parliamentary Proceedings in the year 1680 containing an angry resolution of the House of Commons in England against dissolving grand juries. As to the former, your lordship will find it to be the work of a more artful hand than that of a common Drapier. It hath been censured for endeavouring to influence the minds of a jury, which ought to be wholly free and unbiassed, and for that reason it is manifest that no judge was ever known either upon or off the bench, either by himself or his dependents, to use the least insinuation that might possibly affect the passions or interests of any one single juryman, much less of a whole jury; whereof every man must be convinced who will just give himself the trouble to dip into the common printed trials; so as, it is amazing to think, what a number of upright judges there have been in both kingdoms for above sixty years past, which, considering how long they held their offices during pleasure, as they still do among us, I account next to a miracle.