the knaves and bullies of White's and St. James's. Having glanced at the causes that had made inevitable some such consequence, it only remains to state it. The election for a new Parliament, the old one dying of its seventh year in March, let loose every evil element; and Wilkes found his work half done before he threw himself into it. His defeat for London, his daring and successful attempt on Middlesex, his imprisonment pending the arguments on his outlawry, the result of those arguments, his election as Alderman, and clumsy alternations of rage and fear in his opponents, confirmed him at last the representative of Liberty; and amid tumult, murder, and massacre, the sacred cap was put upon his head. Mobs assembled round his prison to offer him help, and succeeded so far as to involve Scotch soldiers, and their ministerial defenders, in firing fatally upon unarmed men. The laws seemed to have lost their terror, the magistracy their means of enforcing them. In one part of London there was a riot of Irish coal-heavers which lasted nine hours, and in which eighteen persons were killed, before the guards arrived upon the scene. The merchant sailors on the river rose to the number of four thousand, for an increase of wages; and stopped outward-bound ships from sailing till their demands were compromised. The Thames watermen, to the best of their ability, followed the example; so did the journeymen hatters, with what assistance they could give to the general confusion; and even a riot of journeymen tailors threatened to be formidable, till Sir John Fielding succeeded in quelling it. Walpole has connected these various disturbances with the favorable Wilkes season,' and tells us that in all of them was heard the cry of Liberty and its champion. Liberty by itself, to not a few of its advocates, seemed to have ceased to convey any meaning. I take the Wilkes-and-liberty to inform you,' wrote a witty merchant to his correspondents. It was now that Whitfield put up prayers for Wilkes before his sermons; that Dukes were made to appear in front of their houses and drink his health; that city voters in a modest way of trade, refused to give him their votes unless he'd take a gift of money as well, in one instance as much as £20; and that the most notoriously stately and ceremonious of all the ambassadors (the Austrian) was tumbled out of his coach head over heels, to have his heels chalked with Number 45. In the midst of a Wilkes mob the new houses met. 'Good God,' cried the Duke of Grafton, when the Duke of Richmond laughed at Lord Sandwich's proposition to send and see if the riots had ceased; 'is it matter for laughter when mobs come to join 'the name of Wilkes with the sacred sound of liberty!' The poor Duke saw none of the causes that had brought this about, nor dreamt of connecting them with the social disorganization all around: with the seat of government in daily disorder, Ireland insurrectionary, the colonies on the eve of rebellion, and the continent overbearing and arrogant; while to himself a woman or a horse-race had been first in the duties of life, and his allies the Bedfords, while ' each of them had his three thousand a-year and his three 'thousand bottles of claret and champagne,' were insensate and reckless of disgrace. The language of Walpole is not to be adopted to its full extent, it may be true, any more than that of the more terrible assailant who was now (with such signatures as Mnemon, Lucius, and Atticus) sharpening his nameless weapons for more fatal and enduring aim; but in neither case is the desperate bitterness to be condemned as uncalled-for, simply because it involved individual injustice. The time had come when, even at the expense of individual suffering, it was well that such things should be thought and said; and when it was fitting that public men, privately not unamiable or dishonest, should at length be made bitterly responsible for public wrongs, whether sanctioned or committed. Lord Chatham was no worshipper of the mob, but this year roused him from his apathy, and replumed his popular fame. He saw much of what at last was impending. In 'timber-merchants,' who began now to contest seats in the large cities against the Selwyns and men of the aristocratic families, he saw something more than 'd—d carpenters' who (according to Lord Carlisle) should be kept in their saw-pits.' A new power was about to make itself felt, and it found Chatham prepared. He withdrew his name from the Ministry, already reeling under the storm of Wilkes; Shelburne soon after followed him; Camden was not long in following Shelburne; the poor Duke of Newcastle, inapt for new notions, sank into the grave with his old ones; and young Charles James Fox, for the first time, heard Mr. Burke' much talked about at his father's table. The latter incident may mark what the great families found it now no longer possible to ignore ; though it is just as likely that the purchase of an estate induced the talk, as certain late fiery speeches in the house. Burke became this year a landed proprietor. With money bequeathed him by his father and brother, and with large help from Lord Rockingham (at once intended to requite service and render it more effective), he purchased an estate in Buckinghamshire called Gregories or Butlers Court, about a mile from the market town of Beaconsfield, and subsequently known by the latter name. Assisted as he was, the effort must have straitened his means; for in the following year he asks a loan of a thousand pounds from Garrick, which his dear David,' his dearest Garrick,' at once accords. The estate was twenty-four miles from London; and within a hundred yards of the house were the ruins of what had once been Waller's home. Gregories itself has since become a ruin, having been consumed by fire; but nobler memories than the old poet's are those that now linger round what once was the home of Edmund Burke, and Goldsmith has his share in them. Exciting news at the Edgeware Cottage that Beaconsfield purchase must at least have been, though even the noise of Wilkes had failed to force an entrance there. In October, Goldsmith was again in the Temple, and is to be traced at his old haunts, and in the theatres. Somewhat later in the season that now began, Garrick brought out a new tragedy, by Home; but so hateful had Wilkes again made the Scotch, that its author's name had to be suppressed, its own name anglicized, and a young English gentleman brought up from Oxford to the rehearsals, to personate the author. Goldsmith discovered the trick, and is said by Davies to have proposed a hostile party against the play; but this was the transient thought of a giddy 'man, who would as heartily have joined a party to sup'port the piece.' It was probably renewed spleen at Garrick; whose recent patronage of Kenrick, for no apparent reason than his means of mischief and his continued abuse of more successful men, had not tended to oblivion of older offences. Kenrick's latest form of malice was the epigram; but the wit was less apparent than the venom, of connecting Goldsmith's with other names just now rife in the playbills. What are your Britons, Romans, Grecians, Ev'n Homer's self is but their foster-brother. The last allusion was to a story the humbler wits were now telling against Goldsmith. Bickerstaff had invited a party to his house to hear one of his dramatic pieces read; and among the company were Goldsmith and one Paul Hiffernan, already mentioned as one of his Grub Street protégés, of the Purdon and Pilkington class. He was an eccentric, drunken, idle, Irish creature; educated for a |