Tindal, the historian, remarks that about this very year (1753) ‘a wonderful spirit of loyalty began to take place all over the kingdom.’ The debates in the two Houses at Westminster confirm this. The old anxious tone was no longer heard. Not a single reference to Jacobites and their designs can be found in the reports of the proceedings in the Legislature. ‘High Church,’ which was once a disloyal menace, became a subject of ridicule. Horace Walpole thus playfully illustrated the ignorance of the High Church party in a debate on the proposal to repeal the Jews’ Naturalization Bill. ‘I remember,’ he said ‘to have heard a story of a gentleman, a High Churchman, who was a member of this House, when it was the custom that candles could not be brought in without a motion regularly made and seconded for that purpose, and an order of the House pursuant thereto, so that it often became a question whether candles should be brought in or no, and this question was sometimes debated until the members could hardly see one another, for those who were against, or for putting off the affair before the House, were always against the question for candles. Now it happened, upon one of those occasions, that the High Church party were against the affair then depending, and therefore against the question for candles; but this gentleman, by mistake, divided for it, and when he was challenged by one of his party for being against them, “Oh Lord!” says he, “I’m sorry for it, but I thought that candles were for the church!”’ [Sidenote: _ATTEMPT TO MAKE ‘PERVERTS.’_] Admiral Vernon, ‘the people’s man,’ supporting the popular prejudice against the emancipation of the Jews, said that if the Bill passed, rich Jews would insist upon the conversion of everyone employed by them, ‘and should they once get the majority of common people on their side, we should soon be all obliged to be circumcised. That this is no chimerical danger, Sir, I am convinced from what lately happened in my county. There was there a great and a rich Popish lady lived in it, who, by connivance, had publicly a chapel in her own house, where mass was celebrated every Sunday and Holiday. The lady, out of zeal for her religion, had every such day a great number of buttocks and sirloins of beef roasted or boiled, with plenty of roots and greens from her own garden, and every poor person who came to hear mass at her chapel was sure of a good dinner. What was the consequence? The neighbouring parish churches were all deserted, and the lady’s chapel was crowded, for as the common people have not learning enough, no more than some of their betters, to understand or judge of abstruse speculative points of divinity, they thought that mass, with a good dinner, was better than the church service without one, and probably they would judge in the same manner of a Jewish synagogue.’ [Sidenote: _DR. ARCHIBALD CAMERON._]