The King, on his return from the Continent, found his subjects in no bland humour.  All Scotland, exasperated by the fate of the first expedition to Darien, and anxiously waiting for news of the second, called loudly for a Parliament.  Several of the Scottish peers carried to Kensington an address which was subscribed by thirty-six of their body, and which earnestly pressed William to convoke the Estates at Edinburgh, and to redress the wrongs which had been done to the colony of New Caledonia.  A petition to the same effect was widely circulated among the commonalty of his Northern kingdom, and received, if report could be trusted, not less than thirty thousand signatures.  Discontent was far from being as violent in England as in Scotland.  Yet in England there was discontent enough to make even a resolute prince uneasy.  The time drew near at which the Houses must reassemble; and how were the Commons to be managed?  Montague, enraged, mortified, and intimidated by the baiting of the last session, was fully determined not again to appear in the character of chief minister of finance.  The secure and luxurious retreat which he had, some months ago, prepared for himself was awaiting him.  He took the Auditorship, and resigned his other places.  Smith became Chancellor of the Exchequer.  A new commission of Treasury issued; and the first name was that of Tankerville.  He had entered on his career, more than twenty years before, with the fairest hopes, young, noble, nobly allied, of distinguished abilities, of graceful manners.  There was no more brilliant man of fashion in the theatre and in the ring.  There was no more popular tribune in Guildhall.  Such was the commencement of a life so miserable that all the indignation excited by great faults is overpowered by pity.  A guilty passion, amounting to a madness, left on the moral character of the unhappy man a stain at which even libertines looked grave.  He tried to make the errors of his private life forgotten by splendid and perilous services to a public cause; and, having endured in that cause penury and exile, the gloom of a dungeon, the prospect of a scaffold, the ruin of a noble estate, he was so unfortunate as to be regarded by the party for which he had sacrificed every thing as a coward, if not a traitor.  Yet, even against such accumulated disasters and disgraces, his vigorous and aspiring mind bore up.  His parts and eloquence gained for him the ear of the House of Lords; and at length, though not till his constitution was so broken that he was fitter for flannel and cushions than for a laborious office at Whitehall, he was put at the head of one of the most important departments of the administration.  It might have been expected that this appointment would call forth clamours from widely different quarters; that the Tories would be offended by the elevation of a rebel; that the Whigs would set up a cry against the captain to whose treachery or faintheartedness they had been in the habit of imputing the rout of