1768. not escape so easily, if Reynolds had it in his gift. For this, too, was the year when the great painter, entering the little room where a party of his brother artists were in council over a plan for an "Academy of Arts," was instantly, all of them rising to a man, saluted “president;"* and the year had not closed before the royal patronage was obtained for the scheme, and that great institution set on foot which has since so greatly flourished, yet has had no worthier or more famous entry on its records than the appointment of Samuel Johnson as its first Professor of Ancient Literature, and of Oliver Goldsmith as its first Professor of History. Whether the clamour of politics, noisiest when emptiest, failed meanwhile to make its way into the Shoemaker's Paradise, may be more doubtful. A year of such profligate turmoil perhaps never degraded our English annals. The millennium of rioters as well as libellers seemed to have come. The abandoned recklessness of public men was seen reacting through all the grades of society; and, in the mobs of Stepney-fields and St. George's, were reflected 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 666 "with his colloquial prowess the preceding evening. 'Well,' said he, 'we had 'good talk.' BoSWELL. Yes, sir; you tossed and gored several persons."" Boswell, iii. 58. *Northcote's Life, i. 166. Cunningham's Life, 256-8. The great movers in the project were Chambers, West, Cotes, and Moser; Reynolds at first holding himself aloof, from a doubt, not as his less friendly biographer somewhat unfairly alleges, that the countenance of the court would be wanting, but from a fear that the mistakes of "The Incorporated Society of Artists" might again be committed. It was after West had taken to him a proposed list of thirty members, and explained to him enough to show that the new society started from a basis of their own, which might fairly be made to include all the higher objects of such an institution, that Reynolds consented to join. 1768. work half done before he threw himself into it. His defeat for London, his daring and successful attempt on Middlesex, Et. 40. 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 employers and defenders, in the odium of having fired 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 * It is curious to mark the eagerness with which the French welcomed anything of this sort, little dreaming of what was in store for themselves. "2 Aout, 1768. "Il nous est venu d'Angleterre des mouchoirs à la Wilkes; ils sont d'une très "belle toile. Au lieu de fleurs ils sont imprimés et contiennent la Lettre de ce "prisonnier aux habitans du Comté de Middlesex. Il est représenté au milieu, une plume à la main." Bachaumont, Mem. Soc., iv. 80. "I happened," says Watson, afterwards Bishop of Llandaff, in the Anecdotes of his Life (Ed. 1818), i. 55,"to be at Paris about that time" (1768-9); "and the only question which "I was asked by a Carthusian monk, who showed me his monastery, was, "whether Monsieur Vilkes, or the king, had got the better?" 66 1768. in all of them was heard the cry of Liberty and its champion. Et. 40. Liberty by itself, to not a few of its advocates, seemed to have ceased to convey any meaning. "I take the Wilkesand-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 201; 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 House 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 disorganisation all around him: with the seat of government in daily disorder, Ireland insurrectionary, the colonies on the *Coll. Lett. v. 210. Wilkes used to tell with much glee that as he was accidentally walking behind an old lady, she saw his head upon a sign-post, and murmured "He swings everywhere but where he ought." He passed her, turned round, and politely bowed. Letters, i. 112. + Other tradesmen sent him gifts in kind, of which he specially records one of forty-five dozen of candles from a chandler. An unknown and more wealthy patriot sent him also 500 guineas in a handsomely embroidered purse. Apart from these strictly personal tributes, too, 20,000l. was raised by more general subscription for him. I might prolong this note indefinitely. See his Letters, i. 111. Lord Mahon quotes a letter of Franklin's to his son, dated 16th April, 1768. "I went last week to Winchester, and observed that for fifteen miles out of town "there was scarce a door or window-shutter next the road unmarked" [with Wilkes and Liberty, and Number 45], "and this continued here and there quite "to Winchester, which is sixty-four miles." History, v. 193. 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. That language of Walpole is not to be adopted to its full extent, it may be true, any more than the expressions of the more terrible assailant who was now (with such signatures as Mnemon, Lucius, and Atticus f) 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 * Coll. Lett. v. 206. For excellent descriptions of these scenes I may refer also to Walpole's George the Third, and the second volume of his Letters to Mann. Let me add that, waiving the question of whether or not Lord Bute still exercised personal influence at this time over the young king, which the letters I have lately quoted (87, 88) show at least to have been a belief entertained in other than "vulgar" quarters (Memorials of Fox, i. 111), it is quite certain that the system introduced by Lord Bute continued to hold undisputed sway, and that the scenes named in the text were but the natural fruit it bore. I will add that I know of no more painful or humiliating study than that of the various private papers and "Corres"pondences" of the great families who were the chief actors in these scenes, which during the last twenty or thirty years have been given to the world. The first known communication by the writer of Junius appeared in the Public Advertiser on the 28th of April, 1767; but the letters, sixty-nine in number, signed Junius, and forming the collection with which every reader is familiar, extend only over the space from the 21st of January 1769, to the 2nd of November 1771. The 69th Letter, addressed to Lord Camden, is without a date, and there are other private letters to Woodfall, the printer of the Public Advertiser, the last two of which are dated 10th May 1772, and 19th January 1773. 1768. t. 40. 1768. popular fame. He saw much of what at last was impending. Æt. 40. 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 Gilly Williams's "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, to whom the great friend and associate of his mature life was already intimately known, for the first time heard Mr. Burke familiarly talked about at his father's table.t The latter incident may mark what the great families found it now no longer possible to ignore; though it is just as likely that his purchase of an estate induced the talk, as his late fiery speeches in the House of Commons. 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 * See Chesterfield's Letters (Ed. Lord Mahon) iv. 478-9. + His father's first recorded remark upon the new man was highly characteristic. He supposed he was a wonderfully clever man; but (alluding to Burke's excessive practice of talking) "he did not like those clever fellows who could not "plainly say yes or no to any question you asked them." Memorials of Fox, i. 66. Lord Holland would thoroughly have appreciated Goldsmith's couplet "Who, too deep for his hearers, still went on refining, And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining." He writes to Shackleton on the 1st of May, 1768: "Again elected on the |