ound of inability. The annotator justly
observes, that the proposal was absolutely monstrous, being nothing
but a gross fraud on his lordship's creditors. It, however, does not
seem to have attracted the attention of the attorney-general, or the
home-office; but, for some cause or other, the patent did not pass,
the result being, that Lord Bottetort, unable to retrieve his losses,
obtained the government of Virginia in the following summer, where he
subsequently died.

A curious instance of parliamentary corruption next attracted the
notice of the public. It came out, that the city of Oxford had offered
their representation to two gentlemen, if they would pay L7500 towards
the debts of the corporation. They refused the bargain, and Oxford
sold itself to the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Abingdon. The matter
was brought before the House, and the mayor of Oxford and ten of the
corporation appeared at the bar, confessing their crime, and asking
pardon. It ended with committing them to prison for five days. A note
describes the whole affair as being treated with great ridicule,
(there being probably not a few who looked upon things of this nature
as a matter of course;) and the story being, that the aldermen
completed their bargain with the Duke of Marlborough, during their
imprisonment in Newgate.

On the 11th of March 1768, the parliament was dissolved. Walpole says,
"that its only characteristic was servility to the government; while
our ancestors, we presume, from the shamelessness of its servility,
might have called it the Impudent Parliament."

After wearying himself in the dusty field of politics, Walpole
retired, like Homer's gods from Troy, to rest in the more flowery
region of literature. His habits led him to the enjoyment of bitter
political poetry, which, in fact, is not poetry at all; while they
evidently disqualified him from feeling the power and beauty of the
imaginative, the only poetry that deserves the name. Thus, he
describes Goldsmith as the "correct author of _The Traveller_," one of
the most beautiful poems in the language; while he panegyrizes, with a
whole catalogue of plaudits, Anstey's _Bath Guide_--a very scandalous,
though undoubtedly a lively and ingenious, caricature of the habits of
the time. An ultra-heavy poem by Bentley, the son of the critic,
enjoys a similar panegyric. We give, as an evidence of its dulness, a
fragment of its praise of Lord Bute:--

"Oh, if we seize with skill th