Pope turned Bishop Atterbury to very good account, pleasurable alike to the Jacobites who admired the prelate for his politics, if for nothing besides, and to himself, for another reason. The poet possessed an original portrait of the Bishop of Rochester, the work of Sir Godfrey Kneller. There was a contemporary painter, named Worsdale, who had also been an actor, who had moreover been satirised on the stage, and who had kept, loved, lived on, and kicked the once celebrated and ever unfortunate Lætitia Pilkington. Pope got Worsdale to make copies of Kneller’s portrait of Atterbury, for three or four guineas. ‘And when,’ says Sir James Prior, in his ‘Life of Malone,’ ‘he wished to pay a particular compliment to one of his friends, he gave him an original picture of Atterbury.’ Of these original Knellers, Worsdale painted several. [Sidenote: _LAYER’S HEAD._] Atterbury having passed away from the public gaze, there was nothing more attractive to look at than Layer’s head, which was spiked on Temple Bar. Whig caricaturists loved to show the hideous sight in a ridiculous point of view. Jacobites went to the Bar as to a sanctified shrine of martyrs. There never was a head there that did not seem to them holy. That of Layer was blown down as Mr. Pearce, of Took’s Court, a well-known nonjuring attorney and an agent for the nonjuring party, was passing. He bought the head of him who had picked it up. Dr Rawlinson, the learned Jacobite antiquary, bought it, at a high price, from Pearce, kept the skull in his study, and was buried with it in his hand. But there is a tradition that after the relic had been exhibited in a tavern, it was buried beneath the kitchen of the house, and the head of some other person was sold to Rawlinson, as that of Layer!’ Imagine,’ says a note in Nichol’s ‘Literary Anecdotes,’ ‘the venerable antiquary and his companion waking out of their slumber! How would the former be amazed and mortified on his perceiving he had been taking to his bosom, not the head of the counsellor, but the worthless pate of some strolling mendicant, some footpad, or some superannuated harlot!’ [Sidenote: _THE CO-CONSPIRATORS._]