[The house agreed to this, and the libeller was sent to the common jail of Middlesex, by warrant from the speaker.]

I shall not directly fall on the many gross errors, nor expose the notorious absurdities of this prostituted libeller, until I have let the Learned World fairly into the controversy depending; and then leave the unprejudiced to judge of the merits and justice of my cause.

Therefore dear Ned, at my advice forbear, Such loud complaints 'gainst critics to prefer, Since thou art turn'd an arrant libeller: Thou sett'st thy name to what thyself do'st write; Did ever libel yet so sharply bite?

To the repeal of that clause, which is inoperative against the common libeller, we have no objection, and the Attorney-General is pledged to it; but the House of Lords would not like, and the King would not endure, the repeal of that provision without the substitution of some other security.

A LIBELLER Is a certain classic author that handles his subject-matter very ruggedly, and endeavours with his own evil words to corrupt another man's good manners.

Next him, writers and libellers are most pernicious, for though the contagion they disperse spreads slower and with less force than preaching, yet it lasts longer, and in time extends to more, and with less danger to the author, who is not easily discovered if he use any care to conceal himself.

He jested away even the practicals of life, jested himself into disgrace, into prison, into contempt, into the basest employmentthat of a libeller tacked on to a party.

In its imputation of designs of deliberate wickedness, it very far exceeded the bitterest passages of The North Briton; and Lord Weymouth's colleagues, therefore, thought they might safely follow the precedent set in 1764, of branding the publication as a libel, and again procuring the expulsion of the libeller from the House of Commons.

But gentlemanly reproof and delicate satire would be wasted on "libellers and common nuisances."

Exclusion, persecution, severe punishments for libellers and demagogues, proscriptions, massacres, civil war, if necessary, rather than any concession to a discontented people; these are the measures which he seems inclined to recommend.

Let us not be understood as wishing to abridge an historian's full liberty of censurebut he should not be a satirist, still less a libeller.

If we hold up slavery to the view of an impartial public as it is, and if such view creates astonishment and indignation, surely we are not to be charged as libellers.

The following example is from an Essay on Satire, printed with Pope's Works, but written by one of his friends: "Whose is the crime, the scandal too be theirs; The knave and fool are their own libellers.

"From libel, come libelled, libeller, libelling, libellous; from grovel, grovelled, groveller, grovelling; from gravel, gravelled, and gravelling."Webster cor.

He was subjected to slight punishment for contumacy to the vice-master, and seems, according to the statement of an obscure libeller, to have been engaged in some public and notorious dispute with a nobleman's son, probably on account of the indulgence of his turn for satire.

As Dryden's detractors have been nearly as anxious to blacken his wife's character as his own, they have seized on this letter to confirm the reckless and random assertions of contemporary libellers, that her reputation was questionable.

The "Essay on Satire" became public in November 1679, and being generally imputed to Dryden, it is said distinctly by one libeller, that his pension was for a time interrupted.

It was too red in ordinary, though not so much so as his libellers gave out, nor so distinguished in colour from the rest of his face.

This is the only Exception which I shall make to the general Rule I have prescribed my self, of attacking Multitudes: Since every honest Man ought to look upon himself as in a Natural State of War with the Libeller and Lampooner, and to annoy them where-ever they fall in his way.

For some months the affair continued to furnish pretext to obscure libellers to calumniate the Queen with insinuations not less offensive than dangerous from their vagueness; all such writers finding a ready paymaster in the infamous Duc d'Orléans.]

Swift, in his famous letter to Pope, dated Dublin, January 10th, 1720-21, reviews his political opinions of 1708 to justify himself against the misrepresentations of "the virulence of libellers: whose malice has taken the same train in both, by fathering dangerous principles in government upon me, which I never maintained, and insipid productions, which I am not capable of writing."

Neither do the common libellers deny this, who in their invectives only tax the Church with an insatiable desire of power and wealth (equally common to all bodies of men as well as individuals) but thank God, that the laws have deprived them of both.

Formerly in England the penalty of forgery, perjury, &c., it became after the Commonwealth a favourite punishment for seditious libellers.

Prosecuted in that court by Sir Giles Mompesson, as a notorious libeller and scandaller of the judges and first personages of the realm, he was found guilty, and sentenced accordingly.

Infamous libellers and slanderers of the State, like Sir Jocelyn, are ever punished in one way; but new crimes require new manner of punishment.