Read it through once

It is a remarkable circumstance, that among all the adulatory addresses of this time, there is not to be found, in any one of them, any declaration of disbelief in the popish plot, or any charge upon the late parliament for having prosecuted it, though it could not but be well known that such topics would, of all others, be most agreeable to the court. Hence we may collect that the delusion on this subject was by no means at an end, and that they who, out of a desire to render history conformable to the principles of poetical justice, attribute the unpopularity and downfall of the Whigs to the indignation excited by their furious and sanguinary prosecution of the plot, are egregiously mistaken. If this had been in any degree the prevailing sentiment, it is utterly unaccountable that, so far from its appearing in any of the addresses of these times, this most just ground of reproach upon the Whig party, and the parliament in which they had had the superiority, was the only one omitted in them. The fact appears to have been the very reverse of what such historians suppose, and that the activity of the late parliamentary leaders, in prosecuting the popish plot, was the principal circumstance which reconciled the nation, for a time, to their other proceedings; that their conduct in that business (now so justly condemned) was the grand engine of their power, and that when that failed, they were soon overpowered by the united forces of bigotry and corruption. They were hated by a great part of the nation, not for their crimes, but for their virtues. To be above corruption is always odious to the corrupt, and to entertain more enlarged and juster notions of philosophy and government, is often a cause of alarm to the narrow-minded and superstitious. In those days particularly it was obvious to refer to the confusion, greatly exaggerated of the times of the commonwealth; and it was an excellent watchword of alarm, to accuse every lover of law and liberty of designs to revive the tragical scene which had closed the life of the first Charles. In this spirit, therefore, the Exclusion Bill, and the alleged conspiracies of Sidney and Russell, were, as might naturally be expected, the chief charges urged against the Whigs; but their conduct on the subject of the popish plot was so far from being the cause of the hatred born to them, that it was not even used as a topic of accusation against them.