He now took to what Mrs. Partington calls his “opium cum digitalis,” and ceased to publish, though not to write. His republican friends attacked him as a renegade; his royalist foes assailed him as an atheist; and Paul laughed at both. To show however that he had strength if he chose to exert it, he wrote his ‘Gymnasiad,’ a punching philippic against boxing; and he dedicated it to Boughton the “bruiser,”—and all this in the face of fashion, which then took prize-fighters by the arm, and walked with them in the Mall, proud of the acquaintance. The atheistical gentleman who turned his satire from the Cabinet to the “ropes,” was well rewarded by Ministers; and Lord le Despenser gave Paul the post of Deputy-Treasurer of the Chamber, with £800 a year to reconcile the patriot to becoming a placeman. He now took his annual tours like a nobleman, and in the course of one of them he found himself at Deal. There, in a little literary circle, Mrs. Carter met him, to that pious and learned lady’s profound horror. She had scarcely patience to hear him read one of his productions; and she who had translated ‘Epictetus,’ in order to gain consolation from his philosophy for being the native of a place so dull, dreary, dirty, dear, and dismal as Deal, could hardly recall a maxim or two to her mind to fortify her against the annoyance of playing second fiddle to the atheistical son of an old London tailor! Yet Paul was one of the finest of gentlemen in his way, and associated with the very finest of the same class. He not only had his country-house at Twickenham, but a coruscant circle about him of wits whose brilliancy was not considered as tarnished by the most mouldy blasphemy. He was, as I have said, the choice spirit of that club which met at Medenham Abbey. We are struck with a species of horror when we contemplate Augustus and his friends reclining at a banquet dressed out as, and named after, the gods whom they professed to adore. It was a thousand times worse with the atheistical wits who met at Medenham to drown themselves in drink, to wallow in every inconceivable extravagance of vice, and amid it all to laugh at Heaven’s lightning. To crown the horror, these exemplary individuals took the guise and names of the Apostles; and nude Marthas and Marys held the bowl to the lips of Simon Peter and of Jude. But enough of this awful habit of the day. Suffice it to say, that Paul Whitehead and Wilkes, the immaculate patriot, were the most licentious of these pseudo-apostles, and gloried in their shame.