“May 15th.--The Lord Woodstock, son of the Earl of Portland, has carried it at Southampton against Fred Tilney, Esq., a loyal and worthy gentleman, which was done by this trick:--that gentleman happening to pay his reckoning in that town with about 70 Loudores, which he had received there, _the Whig party immediately gave out he was a French pensioner, which calumny answered their purpose_.” “May 29th.--Since my last, we have had an account of several elections, which I leave to the Gazette to enumerate: only the management of some of them is worth notice, particularly for the county of Worcester, where Sir John Packington and Mr. Bromley carried it gloriously against Mr. Walsh, who was set up by the Dissenters. Sir John Packington had a banner carried before him, whereon was painted _a church falling,_ with this inscription--‘_For the Queen and Church, Packington._’ It was observable, that while they were marching through the Foregate-Street, they met the Bishop’s coach, in which was a _Non-Con. teacher_, going to poll for Capt. Walsh, but the horses (at the sight of the church, as ’twas believed) turned tail, overturned and broke the same, and very much bruised the _Holder-Forth’s_ outward man; and this raised no small admiration that the Bishop’s horses should be afraid of a church.” The commotion which in the days of Queen Anne was manifested in the public thoroughfares at an electioneering epoch is incidentally pictured by Dean Swift, in his “Journal to Stella:”-- “Oct. 5, 1710.--This morning Delaval came to see me, and went to Kneller’s, who was in town. On the way we met the electors for parliament-men, and the rabble came about our coach, crying, ‘A Colt! A Stanhope! etc.’ _We were afraid of a dead cat, or our glasses broken, and so were always of their side._” Among the lost illustrations of the humours of elections is the ballad, “full of puns,” which Swift mentions having produced on that said Westminster election; for any trace of which we have vainly searched among the political pamphlets and poetical broadsides of the Queen Anne era. It is Swift who relates the untoward catastrophe which awaited his friend, Richard Steele, the improvident “Tatler,” who, having a design to serve in the last parliament of Queen Anne, resigned his place of Commissioner of the Stamp Office in June, 1713, and was chosen for the borough of Stockbridge, in Hampshire, one of the snug constituencies swept away by the Reform Bill a century or so later. The Dean writes of Dick’s adventures on this errand:-- “There was nothing there to perplex him but the payment of a £300 bond, which lessened the sum he carried down, and which an odd dog of a creditor had intimation of and took this opportunity to recover.”