The severity of the Government against the outspoken defiances of the Jacobites does not appear to have silenced many of them. Even the keeper of the Hounslow toll-bar was not afraid to publish such seditious principles as Atterbury more prudently kept within the knowledge of himself and his confederates. One night, a ministerial messenger,――a mounted post-boy, in fact,――with expresses for Scotland, rode up to the bar, announced his office, and demanded free and instant passage. The toll-collector, Hall, refused to accede to either demand. ‘You don’t know,’ said the post-boy, ‘what comes of stopping the king’s expresses.’ ――‘I care no more for the one than I do for the other!’ was the disloyal reply of Hall, who actually kept the lad from proceeding for a couple of hours. When he raised the bar he was reminded of what would follow, at which he laughed; but he looked solemn enough a little later, when he stood in the pillory at Charing Cross, and lay for a fortnight in that Hell upon Earth, Newgate. The year 1721 began with a burst of spring which terrified nervous people. ‘Strange and ominous,’ was the comment on the suburban fields full of flowers, and on the peas and beans in full bloom at Peterborough House, Milbank. When the carnations budded in January, there was ‘general amazement’ even among people who cut coarse jokes on the suicides which attended the bursting of the South Sea bubble. The papers were quite funny, too, at the devastation which an outbreak of smallpox was making among the young beauties of aristocratic families. The disease had silenced the scandal at tea-tables, by carrying off the guests, and poor epigrams were made upon them. Dying, dead, or ruined, everyone was laughed at. ‘Among the many persons of distinction,’ say the papers, ‘that lie ill of various distempers, is the Lady of Jonathan Wild, Esq., Chief Thief-Taker-General to Great Britain. She is at the point of death at his worship’s house in the Old Bailey.’ [Sidenote: _CIBBER’S REFUSAL._] On St. Valentine’s day, in this year, at Drury Lane, Cibber reaped the first fruits of politics grafted on the drama, from the seed he had sown, in 1717, by his ‘Nonjuror.’ The anti-Jacobite piece, on the present occasion, was ‘The Refusal, or the Ladies’ Philosophy.’ It is a poor adaptation of Molière’s ‘Femmes Savantes,’ but it served its purpose of crying up present Whiggery and crying down the Toryism of Queen Anne’s reign. Applause or murmurs, according to individual circumstances, greeted such a provocative passage as this: ‘What did your courtiers do all the last reign, but borrow money to make war, and make war to make peace, and make peace to make war; and then to be bullies in the one and bubbles in the other!’ [Sidenote: _IN STATE TO THE PILLORY._]