For putting partly in type a Jacobite pamphlet, Matthews was no sooner hanged than printed copies of the ‘Vox Populi’ were to be bought by those who knew how to go about it. As an example, the judicial murder of the young printer was useless. Messengers and constables, furnished with general warrants, sought for copies of the obnoxious work, and if any were discovered, the occupants of the houses where the discovery was made, appeared to be more astonished than the police. Even while Matthews was hanging, a Mrs. Powell boldly sent forth the pamphlet, from her own press. Everybody thought it delicious to buy what it was death to print. Mrs. Powell, however, on expressing contrition at the bar, was only warned to be upon her guard; and when the pamphlet lost its prestige of being mortal to the printer, it ceased to be cared for by the public. Persecution did not make the party more loyal. Party spirit was as bitter as ever. When the Prince of Wales went on the 7th of November to the Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre to see young Beckingham’s ‘Henri IV. of France,’ the Jacobite papers quietly remarked that the Fleet Street linen-draper’s son showed, in his drama, how easily a king might be killed, as he passed on the highway, in his chariot. The Whig papers saw in the play a reflex of the times, and discerned Popish ecclesiastics putting their heads together in order to accomplish the sovereign’s murder. There was, of course, no offence in the play; and if there had been, penalty was not certain to follow. Law and justice ‘danced the hays’ in the wildest fashion. [Sidenote: _INCIDENTS._] Beckingham’s tragedy at Lincoln’s Inn Fields really had no political element in it. This was not the case with a tragedy produced four days later (Nov. 11) at Drury Lane, namely, Dennis’s ‘Invader of his Country, or the Fatal Resentment.’ It was a mutilation of Shakespeare’s ‘Coriolanus,’ and Booth was the hero. There is significance in the fact that neither party made any application of its speeches or incidents. After three nights the play was shelved, and Dennis swore in print that Cibber and other actors were ignorant, incapable, and destitute of all love of country; for the sake of which and for that of the king, Dennis declared he had constructed the piece. A sore point with Dennis was that his benefit was fixed for a night, when a hundred persons who designed to be at the theatre, ‘were either gone to meet the king, or preparing in town to do their duty to him on his arrival from abroad.’ When the king, on his arrival, passed through St. James’s Park, a Nonjuring minister indiscreetly gave uncourteous expression to his Jacobite thoughts, and found his liberty curtailed, in consequence. [Sidenote: _ROYAL CONDESCENSION._]