the Court by the capacity and vigour which they had shown in opposition.  The Revolution seemed to have for ever secured the State against the domination of a Carr or a Villiers.  Now, however, the personal regard of the King had at once raised a man who had seen nothing of public business, who had never opened his lips in Parliament, over the heads of a crowd of eminent orators, financiers, diplomatists.  From a private gentleman, this fortunate minion had at once been turned into a Secretary of State.  He had made his maiden speech when at the head of the administration.  The vulgar resorted to a simple explanation of the phaenomenon, and the coarsest ribaldry against the Princess Mother was scrawled on every wall, and sung in every alley.

This was not all.  The spirit of party, roused by impolitic provocation from its long sleep, roused in turn a still fiercer and more malignant Fury, the spirit of national animosity.  The grudge of Whig against Tory was mingled with the grudge of Englishman against Scot.  The two sections of the great British people had not yet been indissolubly blended together.  The events of 1715 and of 1745 had left painful and enduring traces.  The tradesmen of Cornhill had been in dread of seeing their tills and warehouses plundered by barelegged mountaineers from the Grampians.  They still recollected that Black Friday, when the news came that the rebels were at Derby, when all the shops in the city were closed, and when the Bank of England began to pay in sixpences.  The Scots, on the other hand, remembered, with natural resentment, the severity with which the insurgents had been chastised, the military outrages, the humiliating laws, the heads fixed on Temple Bar, the fires and quartering blocks on Kennington Common.  The favourite did not suffer the English to forget from what part of the island he came.  The cry of all the south was that the public offices, the army, the navy, were filled with high-cheeked Drummonds and Erskines, Macdonalds and Macgillivrays, who could not talk a Christian tongue, and some of whom had but lately begun to wear Christian breeches.  All the old jokes on hills without trees, girls without stockings, men eating the food of horses, pails emptied from the fourteenth story, were pointed against these lucky adventurers.  To the honour of the Scots it must be said, that their prudence and their pride restrained them from retaliation.  Like the princess in the Arabian tale, they stopped their ears tight, and, unmoved by the shrillest notes of abuse, walked on, without once looking round, straight towards the Golden Fountain.