e had created himself a leader of the Independents, a knot of desperate
tradesmen, many of them converted to Jacobinism, by being fined at the
custom-house for contraband practices. One of their chiefs was
Blackistone, a grocer in the Strand, detected in smuggling, and forgiven
by Sir Robert Walpole; detected again, and fined largely, on which he
turned patriot and became an alderman of London.

At the beginning of this parliament, rejected by Westminster, and
countenanced nowhere, he bought what Walpole pleasantly calls, the loss
of an election at Weobly, for which place, however, on a petition, Fox
procured his return to parliament, and immediately had the satisfaction
to find him declare against the court. At the Westminster election, his
indefatigability against the ministerial favourite came amply into play.
All the morning he passed at the hustings, then came to the House, where
he was a principal actor, and the rest of the day he spent at hazard,
not to mention the hours spent in collecting materials for his speeches,
or in furnishing them to his weekly mercenaries.

We then have a touch of the pencil at Lord Nugent.

"This Irishman's style was florid bombast; his impudence as great as if
he had been honest. He affected unbounded good-humour, and it was
unbounded, but by much secret malice, which sometimes broke out into
boisterous railing, but oftener vented itself in still-born satires.
Nugent's attachments were to Lord Granville; but all his flattery was
addressed to Mr. Pelham, whom he mimicked in candour, as he often
resembled Granville in ranting. Nugent had lost the reputation of a
great poet, by writing works of his own, after he had acquired fame by
an ode that was the joint production of several others."

Walpole certainly had an aversion to the wits of his day, with the
exception of George Selwyn; on whom he lavished a double portion of the
panegyric that he deserved, as a sort of compensation for his petulance
to others. His next portrait was Lord Chesterfield, the observed of all
observers, "the glass of fashion, and the mould of form," a man of
talent unquestionably, and a master of the knowledge of mankind, but
degrading his talent by the affectation of coxcombry, and turning his
knowledge into a system of polished profligacy.

Chesterfield, though not the first who had made a study of the art of
_nothings_, was the first who publicly prided himself on its study; and
while France owed her fashi