is daughter
was, and passing, as he wrote, "the most unhappy days he had known," an
angry mob gibbeted the effigy of Bute at one of the gates of Exeter,
and kept the image swinging there in derision for a fortnight in
defiance of the authorities. While Wilkes was languishing in foreign
exile to save his liberty and his very life from the malignity of his
enemies, his portrait, painted by Reynolds, was placed in the Guildhall
with an inscription in honor of the jealous assertor of English liberty
by law.

Wilkes was well advised in keeping out of England. He had done his
part. The decisions of Pratt in the Court of Common Pleas, the
decisions in the Guildhall, had conferred a permanent benefit upon the
English citizen. But {68} Wilkes was not bound to put himself into the
power of his enemies in order to establish the authorship of the "Essay
on Woman." His enemies took as much advantage as they could of his
absence. He was found guilty by the Court of King's Bench of having
reprinted the number Forty-five and of having written the "Essay on
Woman." As he did not appear to receive his sentence, he was promptly
outlawed for contumacy. Thus a Ministry wise in their own conceit
believed that they had got rid of Wilkes for good and all. They did
not note, or if they noted did not heed, that the favorite sign of
ale-houses throughout the country was the head of Wilkes. They were
indifferent to the fact that Wilkes had come to be regarded in all
directions as the champion of popular liberty. All they knew, all that
they cared to know, was that Wilkes was in exile, and was like enough
to die in exile. Even the success of "The Beggar's Opera" taught them
nothing, and yet the success of "The Beggar's Opera" was a significant
lesson. "The Beggar's Opera" was revived at Covent Garden while the
excitement about Wilkes was at its height, and its audiences were as
ready to read in political allusions between the lines as they had been
at the time of its first production. The line "That Jemmy Twitcher
should peach on me I own rather surprises me" was converted at once
into an innuendo at the expense of Lord Sandwich, to whom the name
Jemmy Twitcher was immediately applied by the public at large, almost
to the disuse, so Horace Walpole tells us, of his own title.

[Sidenote: 1764--Death of Hogarth and Churchill]

But the Ministry had so far triumphed that for four years Wilkes
remained away from England, drifting from o