scrawled on every wall and sung in every alley.

This was not all. The spirit of party, roused by impolitic provocation
from its long sleep, roused in turn a still fiercer and more malignant
Fury, the spirit of national animosity. The grudge of Whig against Tory
was mingled with the grudge of Englishman against Scot. The two sections
of the great British people had not yet been indissolubly blended
together. The events of 1715 and of 1745 had left painful and enduring
traces. The tradesmen of Cornhill had been in dread of seeing their
tills and warehouses plundered by bare-legged mountaineers from the
Grampians. They still recollected that Black Friday, when the news came
that the rebels were at Derby, when all the shops in the city were
closed, and when the Bank of England began to pay in sixpences. The
Scots, on the other hand, remembered with natural resentment, the
severity with which the insurgents had been chastised, the military
outrages, the humiliating laws, the heads fixed on Temple Bar, the
fires and quartering blocks on Kennington Common. The favorite did not
suffer the English to forget from what part of the island he came. The
cry of all the south was that the public offices, the army, the navy,
were filled with high-cheeked Drummonds and Erskines, Macdonalds and
Macgillivrays, who could not talk a Christian tongue, and some of whom
had but lately begun to wear Christian breeches. All the old jokes on
hills without trees, girls without stockings, men eating the food of
horses, pails emptied from the fourteenth story, were pointed against
these lucky adventurers. To the honor of the Scots it must be said that
their prudence and their pride restrained them from retaliation. Like
the princess in the Arabian tale, they stopped their ears tight, and,
unmoved by the shrillest notes of abuse, walked on, without once looking
round, straight towards the Golden Fountain.

Bute, who had always been considered as a man of taste and reading,
affected, from the moment of his elevation, the character of a Maecenas.
If he expected to conciliate the public by encouraging literature and
art, he was grievously mistaken. Indeed, none of the objects of his
munificence, with the single exception of Johnson, can be said to have
been well selected; and the public, not unnaturally, ascribed the
selection of Johnson rather to the Doctor's political prejudices than to
his literary merits; for a wretched scribbler named Shebbeare, w