an it had
been since the Great Rebellion, and declared it to be approaching by
fast strides to some sharp crisis. Men who remembered their Roman
history, fancied that they saw every symptom of confusion that
preceded the ruin of the Commonwealth, and began to inquire uneasily
what was the temper of the army. Men who remembered the story of the
violence and insatiable factiousness of Florence, turned again to
Macchiavelli and to Guicciardini, to trace a parallel between the
fierce city on the Arno and the fierce city on the Thames. When the
King of Sweden, in 1772, carried out a revolution, by abolishing an
oligarchic council and assuming the powers of a dictator, with the
assent of his people, there were actually serious men in England who
thought that the English, after having been guilty of every meanness
and corruption, would soon, like the Swedes, own themselves unworthy
to be free. The Duke of Richmond, who happened to have a claim to a
peerage and an estate in France, excused himself for taking so much
pains to establish his claim to them, by gravely asking who knew that
a time might not soon come when England would not be worth living in,
and when a retreat to France might be a very happy thing for a free
man to have?

The reign had begun by a furious outbreak of hatred between the
English and the Scotch. Lord Bute had been driven from office, not
merely because he was supposed to owe his power to a scandalous
friendship with the king's mother, but because he was accused of
crowding the public service with his detested countrymen from the
other side of the Tweed. He fell, less from disapproval of his policy,
than from rude prejudice against his country. The flow of angry
emotion had not subsided before the whisper of strife in the American
colonies began to trouble the air; and before that had waxed loud, the
Middlesex election had blown into a portentous hurricane. This was the
first great constitutional case after Burke came into the House of
Commons. As, moreover, it became a leading element in the crisis which
was the occasion of Burke's first remarkable essay in the literature
of politics, it is as well to go over the facts.

The Parliament to which he had first been returned, now approaching
the expiry of its legal term, was dissolved in the spring of 1768.
Wilkes, then an outlaw in Paris, returned to England, and announced
himself as a candidate for the city. When the election was over, his
name stood l