WILLIAM THE THIRD.

85

by a great majority, and was succeeded by the glory ofthe Whig party, Isaac Newton.

There was one district to which the eyes of hundredsof thousands were turned with anxious interest, Glou-cestershire. Would the patriotic and high spirited gentryand yeomanry of that great county again confide theirdearest interests to the Impudent Scandal of parliaments,the renegade, the slanderer, the mountebank, who hadbeen, during thirteen years, railing at his betters ofevery party with a spite restrained by nothing but thecraven fear of corporal chastisement, and who had in thelast Parliament made himself consjficuous by the abjectcourt which he had jiaid to Lewis and by the impertinencewith which he had spoken of William.

The Gloucestershire election became a national affair.Portmanteaus full of pamphlets and broadsides were sentdown from London. Every freeholder in the county hadseveral tracts left at his door. In every market place, onthe market day, papers about the brazen forehead, theviperous tongue, and the white liver of Jack Howe, theFrench King’s buffoon, flew about like flakes in a snowstorm. Clowns from the Cotswold Hills and the forest ofDean, who had votes, but who did not know their letters,were invited to hear these satires read, and were askedwhether they were prepared to endure the two great evilswhich were then considered by the common people ofEngland as the inseparable concomitants of despotism, towear wooden shoes, and to live on frogs. The dissenting

CHAP.

xxv.

1701 .