ences were noted down as London being at the mercy of Highlanders
and Friars; Walbrook church and many others being razed to the ground;
Father O'Blaze, a Dominican, exulting over it; Queen Anne's statue at
Paul's taken away, and a large Crucifix erected in its place; the Bank,
South-Sea, India Houses, &c. converted into convents; Father Macdagger,
the Royal confessor, preaching at St. James's; three Anabaptists hung at
Tyburn, attended by their ordinary, Mr. Machenly (a grotesque name for
the ranting fellow who was wont to be known as Orator Henley); Father
Poignardini, an Italian Jesuit, made Privy-Seal; four Heretics burnt in
Smithfield; the French Ambassador made a Duke, with precedence; Cape
Breton given back to the French, with Gibraltar and Port Mahon to the
Spaniards; the Pope's nuncio entering London, and the Lord Mayor and
Aldermen kissing his feet; an office opened in Drury Lane for the sale
of papistical Pardons and Indulgences; with the like prophecies
calculated to arouse the bigotry of the lower and middle orders, and to
lash them into a religious as well as a political frenzy. For a cry of
"No Popery" has ever acted upon a true-born Englishman as a red rag
does on a bull. Perhaps the thing that went best down of all Mr.
Fielding's drolleries, and tickled the taste of the town most amazingly,
was the passage where he made his honest London tradesman enter in his
diary to this effect: "My little boy Jacky taken ill of the itch. He had
been on the parade with his godfather the day before to see the Life
Guards, and had just touched one of their plaids." One of the King's
Ministers said long afterwards that this passage touching the itch was
worth two regiments of horse to the cause of Government. At this
distance of time one doesn't see much wit in a scurrilous lampoon, of
which the gist was to taunt one's neighbours with being afflicted with a
disease of the skin: and, indeed, the lower ranks of English were, in
those days, anything but free from similar ailments, and, in London at
least, were in their persons and manners inconceivably filthy. But 'tis
astonishing what a mark you can make with a coarse jest, if you only go
far enough, and forswear justice and decency.

Strange but true is it to remark that, in the midst of all such
tremendous convulsions as wars, battles, sieges, rebellions, and other
martial conflagrations, men and women and children do eat and drink, and
love and marry, and beget other ba