We get one or two notes about this time that seem to have a forecast of later days in them. An explosion of some kind takes place in Westminster Hall while all the courts of justice were sitting. No great harm seems to have been done, but the event naturally startled people, and was instantly regarded as evidence of a Jacobite plot to assassinate somebody; it was not very clear who was the particular object of hatred. Walpole wrote to his brother, telling him of the explosion, and adding, "There is no reason to doubt that the whole thing was projected and executed by a set of low Jacobites who talked of setting fire to the gallery built for the marriage of the Princess Royal" by means of "a preparation which they call phosphorus, that takes fire by the air." About the same time, too, we hear of an outbreak of anti-Irish riots in Shoreditch and other parts of the east end of London. The "cry and complaint" of the anti-Irish was, as Walpole described the matter, that they were underworked and starved by Irishmen. Numbers of Irishmen, it would seem, were beginning to come over to this country, not merely to labor in harvesting in the rural districts, as they had long been accustomed to do, but undertaking work of all kinds at lower wages than English workmen were accustomed to receive. "The cry is, Down with the Irish," Walpole says; and Dr. Sheridan, Swift's correspondent, proclaiming in terms of humorous exaggeration his desire to get out of Cavan, protests that, failing all other means of relief, "I will try England, where the predominant phrase is, Down with the Irish."