tation of Berwick, and seven thousand
more went in the successful attempt to buy himself the representation
of Aylesbury. It is probable that he hoped to advance his failing
fortunes in Parliament. His fortunes were failing, failing fast. He
made an ignoble attempt to bully his wife out of the miserable income
of two hundred a year which was all that she had saved out of her
wealth, but the attempt was happily defeated by that Court of King's
Bench against which Wilkes was to be pitted later in more honorable
hostility.

It was perhaps impossible that Wilkes could long remain content with
the companionship of men like Dashwood and Sandwich; it was certainly
impossible that men {50} like Dashwood and like Sandwich could for long
feel comfortable in the companionship of a man so infinitely their
superior in wit, intelligence, and taste. The panegyrists of
Sandwich--for even Sandwich had his panegyrists in an age when wealth
and rank commanded compliment--found the courage to applaud Sandwich as
a scholar and an antiquarian, on the strength of an account of some
travels in the Mediterranean, which the world has long since willingly
let die. But the few weeks or months of foreign travel that permitted
Sandwich to pose as a connoisseur when he was not practising as a
profligate could not inspire him with the humor or the appreciation of
Wilkes, and a friendship only cemented by a common taste for common
vices soon fell asunder. There is a story to the effect that the
quarrel began with a practical joke which Wilkes played off on Sandwich
at Medmenham. Sandwich, in some drunken orgy, was induced to invoke
the devil, whereupon Wilkes let loose a monkey, that had been kept
concealed in a box, and drove Sandwich into a paroxysm of fear in the
belief that his impious supplication had been answered. For whatever
reason, Wilkes and Sandwich ceased to be friends, to Wilkes's cost at
first, and to Sandwich's after. Sandwich owes his unenviable place in
history to his association with Wilkes in the first place, and in the
next to his alliance with the beautiful, unhappy Miss Ray, who was
murdered by her melancholy lover, the Rev. Mr. Hickman, at the door of
Covent Garden Theatre. The fate of his mistress and his treason to his
friend have preserved the name of Sandwich from the forgetfulness it
deserved.

[Sidenote: 1763--Wilkes as a Member of Parliament]

In those days Wilkes made no very remarkable figure in Parliament.