LETTER то LORD ELLENBOROUGH FROM Thomas ᏞᎾᎡᎠ . COCHRANE. 10th Earl of Dundonald No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage .... If JUDGES act wrong, their proceedings ought to be published.— LONDON: SOLD BY T. HUGHES, LUDGATE STREET. Price 5s. 1815. THE ill-judged, but well-intended Motion in the House of Commons, on the subject of one of the three Punishments to which I was condemned, six months ago, under your Lordship's authority, for an offence which was completed before I knew it had been meditated, enabled his Majesty's Ministers to assume to themselves the merit of mercy, for an act for which they must otherwise have been content with the more humble praise of prudence. On their mercy, which was preceded by depriving me of my Commission in the Navy, without waiting for the ceremony of my expulsion from Parliament, and followed by a chivalrous game at foot-ball in Westminster Abbey, where the work of degradation was more quietly performed at midnight, than it could have been opposite the Royal Exchange at noon-day, I have only to add, that they kept their clemency in their pockets, until they had exhausted their united eloquence and efforts to persuade the world of the unworthiness of its object.* They did not interpose between me and the Pillory, the receptacle of the most abandoned wretches, until they had exerted their best endeavors to exclude me for ever from more respectable society.-But I intro * See the Speeches of Lord Castlereagh, and the Attorney and Solicitor Generals, during the Debate on Lord Ebrington's Motion, July 19th. B |