Wilkes was now master of the situation; all his expectations were verified. Elated with success, his audacity enabled him to make the most of his undeserved triumph, and assuming a tone which heaped fresh mortifications upon the Court, he printed an address of acknowledgment to his constituents, in which he invited them to give him their instructions from time to time, and promised that he would always defend their civic and religious rights. Although posing as the champion of liberty, Wilkes’s parliamentary career was a dismal failure; in the House he was of no account whatever. It is interesting to note contemporaneous opinion on a point which is so strongly distorted by partisanship that independent impressions are rare. Dr. Franklin, whose genuine passion for liberty it must be admitted was as absorbing and unaffected as Wilkes’s assumed patriotism was shallow and self-serving, happened to be in London at the time of the violent ferment occasioned by the Middlesex election in 1768. Although lately returned from Paris, and himself, a citizen of the land which complimented Paine, he thus unreservedly sums up the popular candidate, together with the political agitation associated with his pretensions. “’Tis really an extraordinary event to see an outlaw and exile of bad personal character, not worth a farthing, come over from France, set himself up as a candidate for the capital of the kingdom, miss his election only by being too late in his application, and immediately carrying it for the principal county. The mob, spirited up by numbers of different ballads, sung or roared in the streets, requiring gentlemen and ladies of all ranks as they passed in their carriages, to shout for ‘Wilkes and Liberty;’ marking the same words on their coaches with chalk, and ‘No. 45’ on every door, which extend a vast way along the roads into the country. I went last week to Winchester, and observed that for fifteen miles out of town there was scarcely a door or window-shutter next the road unmarked, and this continued here and there quite to Winchester, which is sixty-four miles.”