rtune, attain the
highest office in so grave and important a city as the capital of
England, always reviving the more opposed and oppressed, and unable to
shock Fortune and make her laugh at him who laughed at everybody and
everything!" It has been well said by Mr. Fraser Rae that the
significance of election to the office of Lord Mayor was very much
greater more than a hundred years ago than it is now. Then the Chief
Magistrate of the City was not necessarily a man who had passed through
certain minor offices and who rose by routine to fill the highest. At
that time the Corporation was a political power, which ministers had to
take into account, and which sovereigns had to propitiate. A greater
triumph than the mayoralty followed in quick succession. At the
general election of 1774 Wilkes came forward again, and for the fifth
time, as candidate for Middlesex. This time he was not opposed.
Luttrell abandoned an impossible position and did not stand. Ten years
after Wilkes's first appearance in the House of Commons he returned to
it again in triumph as the member for Middlesex and the Lord Mayor of
London.

And here, on the top of his triumph, Wilkes may be said to drop through
the tissue of our history. He was to live nearly a quarter of a
century longer, three-and-twenty years of a life that was as calm and
peaceful as the hot manhood that preceded it had been vexed and
unquiet. Although he lives in history as one of the most famous of the
world's agitators, he had in his heart little affection {138} for the
life of a public man. And the publicity of the civic official was
especially distasteful to him. He hated the gross festivals, the gross
pleasures, the gross display of City life. He sickened of the long
hours spent in the business of mayoralty; he sickened yet more of the
pleasures incidental to mayoralty. Though he remained in Parliament
for many years, and conducted himself there with zeal, discretion, and
statesmanship, and always, or almost always, proved himself to be the
champion of liberty and the democratic principle, he did not find his
greatest happiness in public speeches and the triumphs and defeats of
the division lobby. What he loved best on earth was the society of his
daughter, between whom and himself there existed a friendship that is
the best advocate for Wilkes's character. And he loved best to enjoy
that society in the kind of sham classic retirement which had so
powerful an at