It was said that the chief offense was given by the statement that "this 'Adonis in loveliness' was a corpulent man of fifty." The article, although true, was of doubtful expediency and offensively violent and personal. Further, the unremitting attacks of _The Examiner_ had been neither dignified nor charitable in their searchlight penetration into the Prince's private affairs.[31] An indictment for libel naturally followed at once. Lord Brougham's "masterly defense"[32] failed to avert the determined efforts of the prosecution to make an example of the editor and the publisher of _The Examiner_. They were sentenced to the imprisonment and fine already mentioned. They refused all overtures for alleviation of the sentence:--overtures from the government; from the Whigs who, in the person of Perry of the _Morning Chronicle_, proposed to obtain a compromise from the prosecution by threatening the Regent with the publication of state secrets from friends; and even from a juror who offered to pay the fine. Leigh Hunt wrote: "I am an Englishman setting an example to my children and my country; and it would be hard, under all these circumstances, if I could not suffer my extremity rather than disgrace myself by effeminate lamentation or worse compromise."[33] The two Hunts thought that the serving of the sentence would be beneficial to the liberal cause, particularly in increasing the freedom of the press.
The general method of _The Examiner_ was vigorous attack. There was no circumlocution, no mincing of language, but aggressive candour, and, when it was considered necessary, wholesale censure and vituperation. A typical illustration is given in this passage, describing a dinner of the Common Council:
"It is the fashion just now to call Bonaparte Antichrist, the Beast with Seven Heads and Ten Horns, ... but if you wish to see those who have the 'real mark of the beast' upon them, go to a City dinner, and after battles for trout and the buffetings for turtle, after the rattling of wine glasses and plethoric throats, after the swillings and the gormandizings, and the maudlin hobs-and-nobs, and the disquisitions on smothered rabbits, and the bloated hectics, and the blinking eyes and slurred voices, and the hiccups, the rantings, and the roars, hear an unwieldy Loan-jobber descanting on our Glorious King and Unshaken Constitution. The stranger, that after this sight, goes to see the beasts in the Tower, is an enemy to all true climax."[34]