[Sidenote: _HEARNE ON ECHARD’S ‘ENGLAND.’_] This clever pamphlet supported the cause which Shippen advocated, but in another way. That offender was then suffering a very mild imprisonment. His Jacobite friends supplied him with all the luxuries that money could purchase. A boat from France was freighted with wine for him, but it was run down in the Thames, and the precious liquid was lost. When downright Shippen was released at the end of the Session, jubilant sympathisers escorted him to the Strand; and there was a levee at his house in Norfolk Street, as crowded as the opposing levees of the king and his son put together. The wrathful old Jacobites were certainly wanting in reason. Even wise, liberal, or politic actions were decried by that disappointed faction. In April, 1718, Echard published in London his ‘History of England.’ It was dedicated to the king, who in return sent the author three hundred guineas. ‘I suppose,’ said Hearne, ‘’t is a most roguish, whiggish thing, much such as what Kennet writes. I have not read it,’ added the Jacobite; ‘such writers ought to be laid aside. Yet I hear that Dr. Prideaux, Dean of Norwich, mightily commends this Echard’s “Church History.” But Prideaux is a great Whig himself, though a good scholar.’ Even Hearne allowed that Echard had a good pen; but he tempered the slight concession by the remark that Echard never looked into, much less followed, original authors.’ [Sidenote: _ATTERBURY CONSPIRING._] All this while secret but busy plotting was going on. Atterbury, in correspondence with the Chevalier and his Court, thus alludes (in a letter to Mar, June, 1718) to one of the go-betweens of that Court and the Deanery at Westminster. This agent passed by the name of ‘Johnson,’ but he was the Nonjuror Kelly, and he is thus described by the Bishop:――‘He has been far from meddling here, or venturing to enter with me into matters foreign to what I apprehend to have been the design of sending him. If he mistook my thoughts upon a certain occasion … I will take effectual care that he shall mistake them no more.’ After speaking of his ‘natural indisposition towards a correspondence of this kind, especially at a juncture when so many, and such malicious, eyes are upon me,’ he laments want of wisdom and unity among the Jacobites around him, but he adds: ‘God grant that our deliverance may not be so far off!’ In another document, written no doubt at the Deanery, Westminster, the patriotic bishop reviewed the general condition of things in London, and concluded by declaring that nothing would be done there unless an invading force came hither, ‘from France, Spain, or Sicily!’ [Sidenote: _THE BISHOP’S VIEW OF THINGS._] The time, he thought, was favourable, and he gave his reasons in the following picturesque sketch of city, court, and administration:――