down in endeavouring to substantiate their accusation, were flung into Newgate by Lord Cartaret with an alacrity which did that Secretary great credit. One of these was Middleton, a fellow who was so steeped in perjury that he was set in the pillory, where a mob of both Whigs and Jacobites killed him. The inquest jury, equally united, brought in a verdict of ‘accidental strangulation.’ This fate did not deter others, for the remainder of the year. ‘It is reckoned,’ writes Swift, ‘that the best trade in London this winter will be that of an evidence.’ ◆[Sidenote: _PATTEN IN PERIL._]◆ It is curious to find drawn to town by the atmosphere of treachery and perjury, no less a person than that Rev. Mr. Patten, who turned King’s evidence in 1716, against the Preston prisoners. He was taken up in Fleet Street for disorderly conduct, in pretty disreputable company; and he came to temporary grief through beating the constable, hectoring the justice, and maintaining, with a modern ritualistic minister’s contempt for the law, that his offence was cognizable only in an Ecclesiastical Court! Previous to Atterbury’s appearance before his Judges, the papers on the Whig side reported petty details of his life in the Tower, and of the doings of his chaplains outside of it. In March, the ‘British Journal’ understood that ‘the Rev. Mr. Thomas Moore, Chaplain to the Bishop of Rochester, now in custody, is charged with secreting a Duty-Bond of Accounts, kept by William Ward, the bishop’s coachman (who is likewise in custody), in which book the Times of the said Bishop’s coming in and going out of Town were set down.’ In another column was given this exquisite specimen of sermon-reporting in the first quarter of the last century:―― [Sidenote: _A STRANGE SERMON._] ‘We hear that on Monday last, a certain Bishop’s Chaplain preach’d a wonderful sermon not far from Somerset House. The subject was, _Honour the King_――――. The words, _Fear God_, in the same verse, he had no mind to trouble his Hearers with, and therefore disjoin’d what the Holy Writer had put together. What was most remarkable in the odd Composition of the Discourse was the Flow of uncouth Similies and Comparisons; particularly he compar’d his Majesty’s subjects to Monkeys pricking and playing with their Tails in China-shops, and by their Gambols throwing down the Wares. His Majesty himself escap’d not a Strook of his queer Wit, for he was compar’d to a Surgeon who first gives Physick before he probes the Wound. He considered, by the By, the wise Ends of proroguing the Convocation which, he said, are not proper to be known at present, but would appear to be all very good, in their Time. We hear the Congregation have desired the favour of him not to preach there any more.’