[Illustration: Drop-I]n the year 1720 a grave Jacobite game was a-playing, but it was all below the surface. London street partisanship seemed to have nearly died out. There was some joyful stir in the coffee-houses where Jacobites most did congregate, when they read that the Government at Geneva, by whose order the Earl of Mar had been seized in that city, had set him free. It was the great South-Sea Stock bubble-year, when the first of the race of rascal ‘promoters’ on an ultra-gigantic scale of swindling arose, to the utter ruin of the victims whom they plundered. When the king sailed from Greenwich, early in the year, on his way to Hanover, and it was discovered that the lords who went with him, and who were ‘proprietors,’ had _sold_ their stock, there was a ruinous panic. When he returned, in November, he made a gift to Cambridge of 2,000_l._, towards building a library. In 1715, he had, at a cost of 6,000_l._, presented that University with the books of Moore, Bishop of Ely. Dr. Trap’s epigram said, the king had sent books to Cambridge and cavalry to Oxford, because the former lacked learning, and the latter failed in loyalty. The answer to this epigram (by Sir William Brown) was that the gifts were so disposed because the Tories owned no argument but force; and that Whigs admitted no force but argument. Jacobite Johnson (who, as Lord Marchmont said, ‘was the first to bring _Whig_ and _Tory_ into a Dictionary), once remarked, that the reply was the happiest extemporary production he had ever heard; he, however, confessed that he hated to repeat the wit of a Whig, urged in support of Whiggism! [Sidenote: _ATTERBURY’S HOPES._] The prelatic conspirator at the Deanery in Westminster addressed a letter to the Chevalier de St. George, in May, which was stuffed with treason and exultation. Atterbury makes this allusion in it to the Chevalier’s marriage with the Princess Sobieska. ‘’Tis the most acceptable news,’ he says, ‘that can reach the ear of a _good_ Englishman. May it be followed every day by such other accounts as may convince the world that Heaven has at last undertaken your cause, and is resolved to put an end to your sufferings!’ In another letter of this year, addressed to the King, James III, Atterbury expresses disappointment that James’s agents in London were not of noble rank. While measures however were being pursued, ‘I thought it my part to lie still and expect the Event.’ But he despairs of the Event occurring speedily: ‘Disaffection and uneasiness will continue everywhere, and probably increase; the bulk of the nation will be still in the true interest, and on the side of justice; and the present settlement will perhaps be detested every day more than it is already, and yet no effectual step will, or can, be taken here to shake it.’ [Sidenote: _DEATH OF LAURENCE HOWELL._]