Secretly, out of the streets, treason was quietly at work.――How early the Jacobites were again actively engaged in London, in pursuit of their purpose, is shown in the fact that Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, was then in correspondence with ‘James III.’ That prince seems to have been impatient at Atterbury’s silence as to how the new project was progressing. ‘I depended upon it,’ said the prelate in his letter of reply, ‘that the best construction would be put upon that silence by one who was well acquainted with the manner in which I was employed,’ The bishop was then in the full strength of his manhood and his intellect. Born in 1662, the son of a country parson, he passed creditably through Westminster and Oxford. He was ordained priest in his 30th year, and was one of the most ‘pushing’ men of his time. When a tutor at the University, he complained to his father of the unsatisfactoriness of his prospects. The father treated his son to both rebuke and counsel. ‘You have only,’ he said, ‘to put your trust in God, and marry a Bishop’s daughter!’ Atterbury did as well by marrying Kate Osborn, daughter of Sir Thomas Osborn, a pretty girl, with a handsome dower of 7,000_l._ [Sidenote: _JACOBITE CONGREGATIONS._] The course taken by Atterbury was known to a few only; but there was strong suspicion against him and Sacheverel. The Whigs sent ‘note-takers’ to write down the remarks made by them in the pulpit, and the muscular Christians and Jacobites flung these reporters into the street. On the last Sunday in May, after the Act of Grace had been issued, Dr. Sacheverel preached at St. Clement’s, in the Strand, ‘a virulent and railing sermon. He was attended,’ according to the Whig papers, ‘by a numerous mob who testified their approbation of his Billingsgate discourse, by huzzaing him to his coach. So that we find other Princes have savage Beasts to govern, besides the Czar of Muscovy.’ It took very little to offend the orthodox Whigs. In July, after the trial of the Earl of Oxford had come to nothing, that nobleman, with his son and brother, attended at Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, and took the sacrament! The clerk was savagely censured, by Whig writers, for selecting the 124th Psalm to be repeated on this occasion, ‘in respect of which,’ say the loyal papers, ‘we refer our readers to their Common Prayer Books,’――where they would find the acknowledgment that the Lord saveth him against whom the wicked combine.――A much more serious affair was the mustering of the drummers of the Guards in front of Lord Oxford’s house, where they beat a point of war, in congratulation of his escape. That they were all locked up in the Marshalsea, on bread and water, was a small penalty for such impudent insubordination. [Sidenote: _LIBERTY USED, AND ABUSED._]