adhered through all the
temptations and dangers of half a century. In small things and in great
his devotion to his party constantly appeared. He had the finest stud in
England; and his delight was to win plates from Tories. Sometimes when,
in a distant county, it was fully expected that the horse of a High
Church squire would be first on the course, down came, on the very eve
of the race, Wharton's Careless, who had ceased to run at Newmarket
merely for want of competitors, or Wharton's Gelding, for whom Lewis
the Fourteenth had in vain offered a thousand pistoles. A man whose mere
sport was of this description was not likely to be easily beaten in
any serious contest. Such a master of the whole art of electioneering
England had never seen. Buckinghamshire was his own especial province;
and there he ruled without a rival. But he extended his care over
the Whig interest in Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Wiltshire.
Sometimes twenty, sometimes thirty, members of Parliament were named by
him. As a canvasser he was irresistible. He never forgot a face that
he had once seen. Nay, in the towns in which he wished to establish an
interest, he remembered, not only the voters, but their families.
His opponents were confounded by the strength of his memory and the
affability of his deportment, and owned, that it was impossible to
contend against a great man who called the shoemaker by his Christian
name, who was sure that the butcher's daughter must be growing a fine
girl, and who was anxious to know whether the blacksmith's youngest boy
was breeched. By such arts as these he made himself so popular that
his journeys to the Buckinghamshire Quarter Sessions resembled royal
progresses. The bells of every parish through which he passed were rung,
and flowers were strewed along the road. It was commonly believed that,
in the course of his life, he expended on his parliamentary interest not
less than eighty thousand pounds, a sum which, when compared with the
value of estates, must be considered as equivalent to more than three
hundred thousand pounds in our time.

But the chief service which Wharton rendered to the Whig party was that
of bringing in recruits from the young aristocracy. He was quite as
dexterous a canvasser among the embroidered coats at the Saint James's
Coffeehouse as among the leathern aprons at Wycombe and Aylesbury. He
had his eye on every boy of quality who came of age; and it was not
easy for such a boy to