“WILLIAM AND MANY.

145

numerous and far less offensive in the seventeenth century thanthey had become in the nineteenth. Most of the boroughs'which were disfranchised in 1832 were, if not positively, yetrelatively, much more important places in the reign of Williamthe Third than in the reign of William the Fourth. Of thepopulous and wealthy manufacturing towns, seaports andwatering places, to which the franchise was given in the reignof William the Fourth, some were, in the reign of Williamthe Third, small hamlets, where a few ploughmen or fishermenlived under thatched roofs: some were fields covered withharvests, or moors abandoned to grouse. With the exceptionof Leeds and Manchester, there was not, at the time of theRevolution, a single town of five thousand inhabitants whichdid not send two representatives to the House of Commons.Even then, however, there was no want of startling anomalies.Looe, EastandWest, which contained not half the populationor half the wealth of the smallest of the hundred parishes ofLondon, returned as many members as London.* Old Sarum,a deserted ruin which the traveller feared to enter at night lesthe should find robbers lurking there, had as much weight inthe legislature as Devonshire or Yorkshire.** Some eminentindividuals of both parties, Clarendon, for example, amongthe Tories, andPollexfen among the Whigs, condemned thissystem. Y r et both parties were, for very different reasons,unwilling to alter it. It was protected by the prejudices of onefaction and by the interests of the other. Nothing could bemore repugnant to the genius of Toryism than the thought ofdestroying at a blow institutions which had stood through ages,for the purpose of building something more symmetrical out ofthe ruins. The Whigs, on the other hand, could not but knowthat they were much'more likely to lose than to gain by a

* Wesley was struck with this anomaly in 1745. See his Journal.

** Pepys t June 10. 1668.

Macaulay, History. 17/. 10

CHAP.

X IX.