who were as willing to accept one king as another, and who would have witnessed with absolute unconcern George the Elector scuttling away from the Tower stairs at one end of the town, while Charles the Prince entered it from another. These factors in his favor he did not know, could not know, could hardly be expected even to guess. [Sidenote: 1745--How London felt] That the news of the rising produced very varied emotions in London we may learn from the letters of Horace Walpole. In one of September 6th to Sir Horace Mann, mixed with much important information concerning "My Lady O" and the Walpole promise of marriage "to young {219} Churchill," comes news of the Pretender's march past General Cope, and very gloomy forebodings for the result. Another letter, which talks of the Pretender as "the Boy," and of King George "as the _person_ most concerned," presents the Hanoverian Elector as making very little of the invasion, answering all the alarms of his ministers by "Pho, don't talk to me of that stuff." Walpole's spirits has risen within the week, for he is much amused by the story that "every now and then a Scotchman comes and pulls the Boy by the sleeve, 'Preence, here is another mon taken,' then, with all the dignity in the world, the Boy hopes nobody was killed in the action." London at large vacillated very much as Horace Walpole vacillated. While on the one side Jacobites began to come out of the corners in which they had long lain concealed, and to air their opinions in the free sunlight, rejoicing over the coming downfall of the House of Hanover, authority, on the other hand, busied itself in ordering all known Papists to leave the capital, in calling out the Train Bands, in frequently and foolishly shutting the gates of Temple Bar, and, which was better and wiser, in making use of Mr. Henry Fielding to write stinging satires upon the Pretender and his party, and hint at the sufferings which were likely to fall upon London when the Highlanders imported their national complaint into the capital. A statesman is reported to have said that this disagreeable jest about the itch was worth two regiments of horse to the cause of the Government.