ylesbury, but never obtained any success as an orator, his
speeches being, though flippant, yet feeble. In truth he had no
great ability of any kind, but dauntless courage and high animal
spirits. Nor should we deny him another much rarer praise,--a vein
of good humor and kindliness, which did not forsake him through
all his long career, amidst the riot of debauchery or the rancor
of faction. So agreeable and insinuating was his conversation,
that more than one fair dame as she listened found herself forget
his sinister squint and his ill-favored countenance. He used to
say of himself in a laughing strain, that though he was the
ugliest man in England, he wanted nothing to make him even with
the handsomest but half an hour at starting! Politics indeed
seemed at first wholly alien from Wilkes's sphere; gayety and
gallantry were his peculiar objects. For some time he reigned the
oracle of green-rooms and the delight of taverns. In conjunction
with other kindred spirits, as Paul Whitehead and Sir Francis
Dashwood, amounting in all to twelve, he rented Medmenham Abbey,
near Marlow. It is a secluded and beautiful spot on the banks of
the Thames, with hanging woods that slope down to the crystal
stream, a grove of venerable elms, and meadows of the softest
green. In days of old it had been a convent of Cistercian monks,
but the new brotherhood took the title of Franciscans in
compliment to Sir Francis Dashwood, whom they called their Father
Abbot. On the portal, now again in ruins, and once more resigned
to its former solitude and silence, I could still a few years
since read the inscription placed there by Wilkes and his friends:
fay ce que voudras. Other French and Latin inscriptions, now with
good reason effaced, then appeared in other parts of the grounds,
some of them remarkable for wit, but all for either profaneness or
obscenity, and many the more highly applauded as combining both.
In this retreat the new Franciscans used often to meet for summer
pastimes, and varied the round of their debauchery by a mock
celebration of the principal Roman Catholic rites.

WILKES'S ESSAY ON WOMAN.

It appears that Wilkes had, several years before, and in some of
his looser hours, composed a parody of Pope's "Essay on Man." In
this undertaking, which, according to his o