might have been effected without any violent clamour, if the chief of the great Whig connection had been ostensibly at the head of affairs.  This was strongly represented to Bute by Lord Mansfield, a man who may justly be called the father of modern Toryism, of Toryism modified to suit an order of things under which the House of Commons is the most powerful body in the State.  The theories which had dazzled Bute could not impose on the fine intellect of Mansfield.  The temerity with which Bute provoked the hostility of powerful and deeply rooted interests, was displeasing to Mansfield’s cold and timid nature.  Expostulation, however, was vain.  Bute was impatient of advice, drunk with success, eager to be, in show as well as in reality, the head of the Government.  He had engaged in an undertaking in which a screen was absolutely necessary to his success, and even to his safety.  He found an excellent screen ready in the very place where it was most needed; and he rudely pushed it away.

And now the new system of government came into full operation.  For the first time since the accession of the House of Hanover, the Tory party was in the ascendant.  The Prime Minister himself was a Tory.  Lord Egremont, who had succeeded Pitt as Secretary of State, was a Tory, and the son of a Tory.  Sir Francis Dashwood, a man of slender parts, of small experience, and of notoriously immoral character, was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, for no reason that could be imagined, except that he was a Tory, and had been a Jacobite.  The royal household was filled with men whose favourite toast, a few years before, had been the King over the water.  The relative position of the two great national seats of learning was suddenly changed.  The University of Oxford had long been the chief seat of disaffection.  In troubled times the High Street had been lined with bayonets; the colleges had been searched by the King’s messengers.  Grave doctors were in the habit of talking very Ciceronian treason in the theatre; and the undergraduates drank bumpers to Jacobite toasts, and chanted Jacobite airs.  Of four successive Chancellors of the University, one had notoriously been in the Pretender’s service; the other three were fully believed to be in secret correspondence with the exiled family.  Cambridge had therefore been especially favoured by the Hanoverian Princes, and had shown herself grateful for their patronage.  George the First had enriched her library; George the Second had contributed munificently to her Senate House.  Bishoprics and deaneries were showered on her children.  Her Chancellor was Newcastle, the chief of the Whig aristocracy; her High Steward was Hardwicke, the Whig head of the law.  Both her burgesses had held office under the Whig ministry.  Times had now changed.  The University of Cambridge was received at St. James’s with comparative coldness.  The answers to the addresses of Oxford were all graciousness and warmth.