About Kew, in her time, there were spirits less loyal and orthodox. Across the river in her youth she may have heard the roars of the mob greeting Wilkes’ repeated hustings triumphs at Brentford--a din that must have reached the royal ears, if George III. did not keep clear of Kew for the nonce. At one of those abortive elections, every road to the poll was blocked by a crowd that would allow no one to pass unless wearing the popular idol’s blue cockade. Wilkes and George might well be nicknamed the “Two Kings of Brentford.” And for ten years or so New Brentford, as the village was then called, had a firebrand parson who would not commend himself to Mrs. Trimmer. Her future home, indeed, was at Old Brentford, now being swallowed up in Ealing. The Brentford political parson was John Horne, afterwards better known as Horne Tooke. Son of a London poulterer, whom he styled to his Eton school-fellows “a Turkey merchant,” Horne was not the best man to hold a living which his friends bought for him about the time of the King’s accession. He is said to have done his duty at least as conscientiously as most parsons of his day; and he seems to have been on the way to become a popular preacher, if he had not been distracted by other avocations. He had studied for the Bar, had suffered as usher in a school; and he practised medicine _en amateur_ among his parishioners, no doubt with “a lurch to quackery,” as is Dr. O. W. Holmes’ reproach against divines straying into his own field. He took pupils at Brentford, one of them the Elwes afterwards so notorious as a miser; and with more than one he travelled on the Continent, leaving behind him, let us trust, an orthodox curate. Then the cry of “Wilkes and liberty!” set him on commencing as politician and pamphleteer; and for years he revelled in the hot water of faction. He canvassed for Wilkes with such zeal that he is accused of saying “in a cause so just and holy he would dye his black coat red.” We hear once of all the constables in London being drafted to Brentford, where the turbulent elections did not go off without bloodshed as well as much beer-tapping. A man lost his life, as was alleged, at the hands of bullies in the pay of the Court party; and that bellicose parson exerted himself to bring the accused to justice, who were convicted but pardoned by the Ministry.