f a confederacy
among the Popish powers to degrade and enslave England, establish an
inquisition in London, and turn the pens of Smithfield market into
stakes and cauldrons; when terrors and alarms which no man understood
were perpetually broached, both in and out of Parliament, by one
enthusiast who did not understand himself, and bygone bugbears which had
lain quietly in their graves for centuries, were raised again to haunt
the ignorant and credulous; when all this was done, as it were, in the
dark, and secret invitations to join the Great Protestant Association in
defence of religion, life, and liberty, were dropped in the public ways,
thrust under the house-doors, tossed in at windows, and pressed into
the hands of those who trod the streets by night; when they glared
from every wall, and shone on every post and pillar, so that stocks and
stones appeared infected with the common fear, urging all men to join
together blindfold in resistance of they knew not what, they knew not
why;--then the mania spread indeed, and the body, still increasing every
day, grew forty thousand strong.

So said, at least, in this month of March, 1780, Lord George Gordon, the
Association's president. Whether it was the fact or otherwise, few men
knew or cared to ascertain. It had never made any public demonstration;
had scarcely ever been heard of, save through him; had never been seen;
and was supposed by many to be the mere creature of his disordered
brain. He was accustomed to talk largely about numbers of
men--stimulated, as it was inferred, by certain successful disturbances,
arising out of the same subject, which had occurred in Scotland in the
previous year; was looked upon as a cracked-brained member of the lower
house, who attacked all parties and sided with none, and was very little
regarded. It was known that there was discontent abroad--there always
is; he had been accustomed to address the people by placard, speech,
and pamphlet, upon other questions; nothing had come, in England, of his
past exertions, and nothing was apprehended from his present. Just as
he has come upon the reader, he had come, from time to time, upon the
public, and been forgotten in a day; as suddenly as he appears in these
pages, after a blank of five long years, did he and his proceedings
begin to force themselves, about this period, upon the notice of
thousands of people, who had mingled in active life during the whole
interval, and who, without being