ABSTRACT
In late November 1795, writing in response to the Seditious Meetings and Treasonable Practices Bills, Samuel Taylor Coleridge condemned William Pitt's 'foul treason against the majesty of man'. Coleridge's definition of 'majesty' makes a nonsense of the two bills, revealing what John Horne Tooke had, in 1786, called the 'grimgibber' of ministerial betrayals of language as well as of justice and law. Understanding how language works is important, claims Tooke, 'For mankind in general, are not sufficiently aware that words without meaning, or of equivocal meaning, are the everlasting engines of fraud and injustice: and that the grimgibber of Westminster-Hall is a more fertile, and a much more formidable, source of imposture than the abracadabra of magicians'. The juxtapositions of the two texts – the handwritten prison journal and the 1786 printed text — are often pointed, and give vivid proof that the imprecise use of words constitutes a system of 'imposture'.
