On the 11th of March the Parliament was dissolved. Thus ended that Parliament, uniform in nothing but in its obedience to the Crown. To all I have said I will only add that it would have deserved the appellation of one of the worst Parliaments England ever saw, if its servility had not been so great, that, as the times changed, it enacted remedies for the evils it had committed with the same facility with which it had complied with the authors of those evils. Our ancestors, who dealt in epithets, might have called it the _impudent_ Parliament.
On the Literature of the Early Part of the Reign of George the Third.
It may not be amiss, by way of appendix, to say a few words on the state of literature during the period I have been describing. It will be the less improper as the controversies and politics of the age gave the principal, almost the whole tone to letters of that time. I do not mean to send the reader to the gross and virulent libels of Wilkes and his still coarser imitators. As a writer, Wilkes’s chief merit was an easy style,--the vehicle of little knowledge, of not much more wit, and of extreme boldness.[78] He was so far an original as being the first who dared to print the most respected names at full length. In imitation of him, the daily and evening newspapers printed every outrageous libel that was sent to them. Till that time the abuse of the week was generally confined to essays in the journals on Saturdays. Bolingbroke and Pulteney were content with battering the Administration once in seven days.
The contests that arose out of Wilkes’s case produced much disquisition into the laws and Constitution; and amidst much party invective, some grave and serious treatises appeared, especially one I have mentioned, the masterly tract called _An Inquiry into the Doctrine of Libels_.[79]
Several other good pamphlets were written on national affairs, particularly relative to the East India Company; and to the heats occasioned in America by the Stamp Act. Among the latter were justly distinguished _A Farmer’s Letters from Pennsylvania_, written by Dr. Franklin.[80]
The state of our finances, and the properest methods of conducting and restoring them, were much discussed: never more ably than in Mr. Edmund Burke’s answer to a (supposed) pamphlet of Mr. Grenville, in 1769.[81]