progeny of Nell Gwynn, than the apostate Arlington or the butcher Jeffreys.  The opposition, therefore, sullenly assented to what the ministry proposed.  From that moment the scheme was doomed.  Everybody affected to be for it; and everybody was really against it.  The three bills were brought in together, read a second time together, ordered to be committed together, and were then, first mutilated, and at length quietly dropped.

In the history of the financial legislation of this session, there were some episodes which deserve to be related.  Those members, a numerous body, who envied and dreaded Montague readily became the unconscious tools of the cunning malice of Sunderland, whom Montague had refused to defend in Parliament, and who, though detested by the opposition, contrived to exercise some influence over that party through the instrumentality of Charles Duncombe.  Duncombe indeed had his own reasons for hating Montague, who had turned him out of the place of Cashier of the Excise.  A serious charge was brought against the Board of Treasury, and especially against its chief.  He was the inventor of Exchequer Bills; and they were popularly called Montague’s notes.  He had induced the Parliament to enact that those bills, even when at a discount in the market, should be received at par by the collectors of the revenue.  This enactment, if honestly carried into effect, would have been unobjectionable.  But it was strongly rumoured that there had been foul play, peculation, even forgery.  Duncombe threw the most serious imputations on the Board of Treasury, and pretended that he had been put out of his office only because he was too shrewd to be deceived, and too honest to join in deceiving the public.  Tories and malecontent Whigs, elated by the hope that Montague might be convicted of malversation, eagerly called for inquiry.  An inquiry was instituted; but the result not only disappointed but utterly confounded the accusers.  The persecuted minister obtained both a complete acquittal, and a signal revenge.  Circumstances were discovered which seemed to indicate that Duncombe himself was not blameless.  The clue was followed; he was severely cross-examined; he lost his head; made one unguarded admission after another, and was at length compelled to confess, on the floor of the House, that he had been guilty of an infamous fraud, which, but for his own confession, it would have been scarcely possible to bring home to him.  He had been ordered by the Commissioners of the Excise to pay ten thousand pounds into the Exchequer for the public service.  He had in his hands, as cashier, more than double that sum in good milled silver.  With some of this money he bought Exchequer Bills which were then at a considerable discount; he paid those bills in; and he pocketed the discount, which amounted to about four hundred pounds.  Nor was this all.  In order to make it appear that the depreciated paper, which he had fraudulently substituted for silver, had been received by him in payment of