cendency in Buckinghamshire. Musgrave was rejected by Westmoreland.
Nothing did more harm to the Tory candidates than the story of Poussin's
farewell supper. We learn from their own acrimonious invectives that the
unlucky discovery of the three members of Parliament at the Blue
Posts cost thirty honest gentlemen their seats. One of the criminals,
Tredenham, escaped with impunity. For the dominion of his family over
the borough of St. Mawes was absolute even to a proverb. The other two
had the fate which they deserved. Davenant ceased to sit for Bedwin.
Hammond, who had lately stood high in the favour of the University of
Cambridge, was defeated by a great majority, and was succeeded by the
glory of the Whig party, Isaac Newton.

There was one district to which the eyes of hundreds of thousands were
turned with anxious interest, Gloucestershire. Would the patriotic and
high spirited gentry and yeomanry of that great county again confide
their dearest interests to the Impudent Scandal of parliaments, the
renegade, the slanderer, the mountebank, who had been, during thirteen
years, railing at his betters of every party with a spite restrained by
nothing but the craven fear of corporal chastisement, and who had in the
last Parliament made himself conspicuous by the abject court which he
had paid to Lewis and by the impertinence with which he had spoken of
William.

The Gloucestershire election became a national affair. Portmanteaus full
of pamphlets and broadsides were sent down from London. Every freeholder
in the county had several tracts left at his door. In every market
place, on the market day, papers about the brazen forehead, the viperous
tongue, and the white liver of Jack Howe, the French King's buffoon,
flew about like flakes in a snow storm. Clowns from the Cotswold Hills
and the forest of Dean, who had votes, but who did not know their
letters, were invited to hear these satires read, and were asked
whether they were prepared to endure the two great evils which were
then considered by the common people of England as the inseparable
concomitants of despotism, to wear wooden shoes, and to live on frogs.
The dissenting preachers and the clothiers were peculiarly zealous. For
Howe was considered as the enemy both of conventicles and of factories.
Outvoters were brought up to Gloucester in extraordinary numbers. In the
city of London the traders who frequented Blackwell Hall, then the great
emporium for woollen good