On the next day, Walpole proposed the postponement of the tobacco bill for two months. On coming out of the House, the mob, who had increased in numbers, continued to insult the members. Walpole, though warned of the reception which he was likely to get, determined to face the mob, as he boldly said, “there was no end of flying from their menaces, and that meeting dangers of this kind was the only way to put an end to them.” With some friends, and to a certain degree protected by the constables, who made a passage for the members to go out, he at last worked his way through the mob; though there was a great deal of jostling, and the constables were obliged to make large use of their staves. Three of his friends (among whom was Lord Hervey) were hurt. The city had been filled with illuminations and bonfires the night before, when Sir Robert Walpole, with a fat woman, (meant for the Queen,) was burnt in effigy. It is singular that this triumph was carried as far as Oxford, where for three nights together, round the bonfires in the streets, the healths of Ormond, Bolingbroke, and James III. were publicly drunk! Lord Hervey’s sketches of character are among the best specimens of his writing, and the most interesting portions of his book. They are always acute and forcible, natural though epigrammatic, and remorseless though polished. As the lives of Chancellors have been, of late, so frequently brought before the public, we give his sketch of Lord Chancellor King. Speaking of King as having risen from obscurity to the woolsack, without an obstruction in his career, and with the general approbation of all judges of legal merit, he observes that, from the moment of his presiding in Chancery, his reputation began to sink. But this is explained, not by any newly discovered deficiency of talent, but by deficiency of decision. “Expedition,” says Lord Hervey, “was never reckoned among the merits of the Court of Chancery; but while Lord King presided there, its delays became insupportable. He had such a diffidence of himself, that he dared not do right for fear of doing wrong. Decrees were always extorted from him; and, had he been left alone, he would never have given any suitor his due, for fear of giving him what was not so; never reflecting that the suspension of justice was almost as bad as the total privation of it. His understanding was of that balancing irregular kind, which gives people just light enough to see difficulties and form doubts, yet not enough to surmount the one, or remove the other. This sort of understanding, which was of use to him as a pleader, was a trouble to him as a judge, and made him make a great figure at the bar, but an indifferent one upon the bench. The Queen once said of him, very truly, as well as agreeably, that ‘he was just in the law, what he had formerly been in the gospel—making creeds of the one, without any steady belief, and judgments in the other, without any settled opinion.