There was one district to which the eyes of hundreds of thousands were turned with anxious interest, Gloucestershire.  Would the patriotic and high spirited gentry and yeomanry of that great county again confide their dearest interests to the Impudent Scandal of parliaments, the renegade, the slanderer, the mountebank, who had been, during thirteen years, railing at his betters of every party with a spite restrained by nothing but the craven fear of corporal chastisement, and who had in the last Parliament made himself conspicuous by the abject court which he had paid to Lewis and by the impertinence with which he had spoken of William.

The Gloucestershire election became a national affair.  Portmanteaus full of pamphlets and broadsides were sent down from London.  Every freeholder in the county had several tracts left at his door.  In every market place, on the market day, papers about the brazen forehead, the viperous tongue, and the white liver of Jack Howe, the French King’s buffoon, flew about like flakes in a snow storm.  Clowns from the Cotswold Hills and the forest of Dean, who had votes, but who did not know their letters, were invited to hear these satires read, and were asked whether they were prepared to endure the two great evils which were then considered by the common people of England as the inseparable concomitants of despotism, to wear wooden shoes, and to live on frogs.  The dissenting preachers and the clothiers were peculiarly zealous.  For Howe was considered as the enemy both of conventicles and of factories.  Outvoters were brought up to Gloucester in extraordinary numbers.  In the city of London the traders who frequented Blackwell Hall, then the great emporium for woollen goods, canvassed actively on the Whig side.

[Here the revised part ends.—­Editor.]

Meanwhile reports about the state of the King’s health were constantly becoming more and more alarming.  His medical advisers, both English and Dutch, were at the end of their resources.  He had consulted by letter all the most eminent physicians of Europe; and, as he was apprehensive that they might return flattering answers if they knew who he was, he had written under feigned names.  To Fagon he had described himself as a parish priest.  Fagon replied, somewhat bluntly, that such symptoms could have only one meaning, and that the only advice which he had to give to the sick man was to prepare himself for death.  Having obtained this plain answer, William consulted Fagon again without disguise, and obtained some prescriptions which were thought to have a little retarded the approach of the inevitable hour.  But the great King’s days were numbered.  Headaches and shivering fits returned on him almost daily.  He still rode and even hunted;26 but he had no longer that firm seat or that perfect command of the bridle for which he had once been renowned.  Still all his care was for the future.  The filial respect and tenderness of Albemarle had been almost