Before long the reverend champion of liberty quarrelled with Wilkes, against whom in his private character Horne pointed an acrimonious pen, to the chuckling delight of their political opponents. He started a newspaper for publishing parliamentary debates, which led to a famous collision between the officers of the House and the City magistrates, and indirectly to the tacit acceptance of a liberty of reporting, hitherto practised by stealth. He next broke a lance against that unknown knight, Junius. It was a more daring adventure when he touched the Government’s shield by hotly espousing the cause of the American Colonists, and writing of the Lexington victims as “murdered” by the King’s troops, for which he had to stand his trial and be convicted of a libel. By this time the parson had resigned his living, and thrown off the gown that hampered his robustious exertions as an agitator, but he remained a resident at Brentford till circumstances took him into Surrey. A Mr. Tooke of Purley had invoked his assistance for a dispute about common rights in that neighbourhood; and Horne proved such a doughty advocate in this case that close intimacy sprang up between the two men. The younger assumed Tooke’s name, and from his house dated the philological and grammatical treatise, _Diversions of Purley_, by which he is best known. In the end there seems to have been some cooling of their affection, for Mr. Tooke left his supposed heir only a small legacy, along with the welcome opportunity for a lawsuit. But Horne Tooke’s real father had left him means to live comfortably at Wimbledon till 1812, long enough to take part with a new generation of Radicals, in which the names of Sir Francis Burdett and Major Cartwright came to the front. He succeeded in slipping into Parliament, strangely enough, as representative of a rotten borough, Old Sarum; and his “election” led to a Bill disqualifying the clergy as members, though a generation would pass before the lease of rotten boroughs was cancelled by such reform as Horne Tooke had loudly advocated at the cost of again standing a trial for high treason.