Charles James Fox, the most popular Whig statesman of history, was returned for Midhurst in May, 1769. He was then only nineteen years and four months old; notwithstanding this, he took his seat the November following, thus becoming a member of parliament before he reached the age of twenty. Curiously enough, his first speech, March, 9, 1770, was on a point of order, arising out of the Wilkes case and the disputes of the Middlesex election. In spite of his affected patriotism, Wilkes made a jest of his insincerity: standing on the hustings at Brentford, his opponent said to him, “I will take the sense of the meeting;” to which the pseudo “champion of liberty” responded, “And I will take the nonsense, and we shall see who has the best of it.” In the same way he coolly disavowed his friend and advocate Serjeant Glynn, his colleague for Middlesex, who had fought all his battles through the courts to the hustings, and _vice versâ_. Some years later, as related by Earl Russell, when the “two kings of Brentford” were excellent friends, and Wilkes, by the irony of fate, became a ministerial candidate, he was received at a levée, when George III., with his habitual practice of asking awkward questions, inquired after Wilkes’s friend, Glynn. “Sire,” said Wilkes, “he is not a friend of mine; he was a Wilkite, which I never was.” One of the most animated pictures which can be found of the humours of canvassing is that drawn from life by William Cowper, at the time the poet’s mind was influenced to cheerfulness by the company of the lively Lady Austen, who, with the more gravely solicitous Mrs. Unwin, made Olney an halcyon abode. The year the “Task” was published, and while Cowper was touching up his spirited ballad of “John Gilpin,” he has set down the visit of an aspiring young senator, no less than Pitt’s cousin, Mr. W. W. Grenville, who, with a retinue of zealous supporters at his tail, quite “without your leave,” bursts upon the poet’s retirement in pursuit of suffrages; this was at the general election of 1784:--