The provident clauses in the Lottery Act of 1753 were made of no effect, mainly by entrusting the chief share in working the Act to an accomplished jobber. One Peter LEHEUP was made a Commissioner of the Lottery. This man had held some employment or other at Hanover, from which he had been recalled with circumstances of disgrace. [Sidenote: 1753. December.] It is to be inferred, from the way in which his name points an epigrammatic phrase in one of the letters of BOLINGBROKE,[53] and in more than one of those of Horace WALPOLE, that it had come, long before this appointment took place, to have a sort of proverbial currency, like the names of ‘CURLL’ or of ‘CHARTRES.’ But, be that as it may, Mr. Commissioner LEHEUP set on foot as thriving and as flagitious a traffic in SLOANE lottery tickets, as was ever set on foot in railway shares by a clever promoter of our own day. He wrote circular letters instructing his correspondents how most effectually to evade the Act. He sold nearly three hundred tickets to a single dealer by furnishing him with a list of ‘Roes’ and ‘Does,’ ‘Gileses’ and ‘Stileses’ at discretion. He supplied himself, with equal liberality; and contrived to close the subscription, after an actual publicity of exactly six hours—for the issue of one hundred thousand tickets. In a few days, of course, tickets in abundance were to be had, at sixteen shillings premium upon each, and in what looked to be a still rising market. The trap proved to be brilliantly ‘successful.’ The subsequent explosion of parliamentary anger was rather increased than lessened by an attempt of Henry FOX (afterwards the first Lord Holland) to extenuate LEHEUP’S offence by some arguments of the ‘_Tu quoque_’ sort. By a great majority, the House of Commons sent up an address praying the King to direct his Attorney General to prosecute the chief offender, who was accordingly convicted and fined a thousand pounds. It is not uninstructive to note that Horace WALPOLE—himself one of the SLOANE Trustees—treats the matter in one of his letters exactly in the offhand man-of-the-world style in which Henry FOX had treated it in the House of Commons.[54]