“⁂ Carriages will be ready on the Day of Election.” Those corrupted electors of Shoreham who resolved themselves into a purchasable community on their own account, were roughly handled by the parliamentary inquisitors, but the avowed and professional traffickers in venal boroughs seemed to conduct their trade openly, and, with the great parliamentary lights, unadmonished and unexposed. They were generally the agents of those who had secured the influence in the seats by various methods--some by inheritance, others by patronage, sometimes by purchase _en bloc_, but generally _en détail_. Men invested in boroughs and cultivated them for sale, secure of a profitable mart when the proper season arrived; the burgage-houses were bought and accumulated; “shambles on old foundations” carrying voting qualifications were secured; burgage tenures were bought up; voters were pensioned from year to year, the process varying according to the nature of the suffrage. As in the case of Sheridan’s expenses at Stafford, the independent electors were retained at a settled price per head. Sheridan’s cost him five guineas per burgess; Wilberforce found four guineas the price at Hull for a plumper. Southey says it rose to £30 a vote at Ilchester, Somerset, where the burgesses had a direct control over their borough; although the tariff ran high, the four candidates who recklessly bribed the constituents in 1774 lost their pains and money, petitions and counter-petitions establishing that the members returned and those who alleged they were unjustly rejected were alike so palpably culpable of corruption that the election was declared void. In 1826, Ilchester is given in the “Manual” as under the patronage of Sir W. Manners. Irrespective of the local and lesser bargains made with the mayors and burgesses, there was the “big business” conducted on behalf of the actual individual landholders of the place--those magnates set down in the election lists of constituencies as “patrons” of boroughs, the dispensers of seats. For an instance of the facility which characterized the _modus operandi_, though “the prices ruled high” owing to extraneous demands, see the “Letters” of that skilled courtier, Lord Chesterfield, deeply versed in political chicanery and combination. In a passage of a letter dated Bath, December 19, 1767, he writes to that hopeful youth who by “Chesterfield’s Letters” was to be polished into a fine gentleman, and for whom a place in Parliament was a desirable opening--