In the reign of queen Anne, the chief matter of interest in connection with London was the political excitement which prevailed. It turned upon questions relating to the Church and the toleration of dissenters. Dean Swift, in a letter dated London, December, 1703, tells a friend, that the occasional Conformity Bill, intended to nullify the Toleration Act, was then the subject of everybody's conversation. "It was so universal," observes the witty dean, "that I observed the dogs in the street much more contumelious and quarrelsome than usual; and the very night before the bill went up, a committee of Whig and Tory cats had a very warm debate upon the roof of our house." Defoe, the well-known author of Robinson Crusoe, and a London citizen, rendered himself very conspicuous by his advocacy of the rights of conscience; and in consequence of writing an ironical work, which then created great excitement, entitled, "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters," he was doomed to stand three successive days in the pillory, at the Royal Exchange by the Cheapside Conduit, and near Temple Bar. Immense crowds gathered to gaze on the sufferer; but "the people, who were expected to treat him ill, on the contrary pitied him, and wished those who set him there were placed in his room, and expressed their affections by loud shouts and acclamations when he was taken down."--_Life of Defoe_, by Chalmers, p. 28. The political excitement of London reached its height during the trial of Dr. Sacheverell. He had preached two sermons, one of which was delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral, on the 5th of November, 1709, in which he inculcated the doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance, and inveighed with great bitterness against all nonconformists. The drift of his sermon was to undermine the principles of the Revolution, though he professed to approve of that event, pretending to consider it as by no means a case of resistance to the supreme power. The ministry, considering that his doctrine struck a fatal blow at the constitution, as established in 1688, prosecuted him accordingly. With Sacheverell numbers of the clergy sympathized, especially Atterbury, the leader of his party. It was supposed that the queen was not unfriendly to the arraigned divine. He was escorted to Westminster Hall, the place of his trial, by immense crowds of people, who rent the air with their huzzas. The queen herself attended at the proceedings, and was hailed with deafening shouts, as she stepped from her carriage, "God bless your majesty; we hope your majesty is for Dr. Sacheverell." The spacious building in which he was tried, the scene of so many state trials, was fitted up for the occasion, benches and galleries being provided for peers and commoners, peeresses and gentlewomen, who crowded every seat; the lower classes squeezing themselves to suffocation into the part of the old building allotted to their use. The London rabble were so much excited by what