“You should use him as we do a hot horse.  When he first frets and pulls, keep a stiff rein and hold him in if you can; but if he grows mad and furious, slack your hand, clap your heels to him, and let him go.  Give him his belly full of it.  Away goes the beast like a fury over hedge and ditch, till he runs himself off his mettle; perhaps bogs himself, and then he grows quiet of course....  Besides, good people, do you not know the nature of the barking creatures?  If you pass but by, and take no notice, they will yelp and make a noise, and perhaps run a little after you; but turn back, offer to strike them or throw stones at them, and you’ll never have done—­nay, you’ll raise all the dogs of the parish upon you.”

This last was precisely what the Government did, and they found reason to regret that they did not take Defoe’s advice and let Sacheverell alone.  When, however, they did resolve to prosecute him, Defoe immediately turned round, and exulted in the prosecution, as the very thing which he had foreseen.  “Was not the Review right when he said you ought to let such people run on till they were out of breath?  Did I not note to you that precipitations have always ruined them and served us?...  Not a hound in the pack opened like him.  He has done the work effectually....  He has raised the house and waked the landlady....  Thank him, good people, thank him and clap him on the back; let all his party do but this, and the day is our own.”  Nor did Defoe omit to remind the good people that he had been put in the pillory for satirically hinting that the High-Church favored such doctrines as Sacheverell was now prosecuted for.  In his Hymn to the Pillory he had declared that Sacheverell ought to stand there in his place.  His wish was now gratified; “the bar of the House of Commons is the worst pillory in the nation.”  In the two months which elapsed before the trial, during which the excitement was steadily growing, Sacheverell and his doctrines were the main topic of the Review.  If a popular tempest could have been allayed by brilliant argument, Defoe’s papers ought to have done it.  He was a manly antagonist, and did not imitate coarser pamphleteers in raking up scandals about the Doctor’s private life—­at least not under his own name.  There was, indeed, a pamphlet issued by “a Gentleman of Oxford,” which bears many marks of Defoe’s authorship, and contains an account of some passages in Sacheverell’s life not at all to the clergyman’s credit.  But the only pamphlet outside the Review which the biographers have ascribed to Defoe’s activity, is a humorous Letter from the Pope to Don Sacheverellio, giving him instructions how to advance the interest of the Pretender.  In the Review Defoe, treating Sacheverell with riotously mirthful contempt, calls for the punishment of the doctrines rather than the man.  During the trial, which lasted more than a fortnight, a mob attended the Doctor’s