It would seem that the term ‘Prime Minister’ was first applied to Walpole, and in a reproachful sense. Speaking in the House, in 1741, he said of his opponents: ‘Having invested me with a kind of mock dignity, and styled me a _Prime Minister_, they impute to me an unpardonable abuse of that chimerical authority, which only they created and conferred.’ Under the Earl of Wilmington as First Lord of the Treasury the better times, foretold by the ex-Prime Minister’s enemies, failed to come to pass. Meanwhile, every significant incident in Parliament, every detail of the domestic life of the king, was regularly transmitted from London to the Chevalier, at Rome. One of the Parliamentary incidents of the year was the appointment of the Duke of Argyle to the offices of Master-General of the Ordnance, and Commander-in-chief of the Forces, offices which he resigned, a month later, because of the exclusion of Tories from power, but especially because of the refusal to admit the Jacobite, Sir John Hynde Cotton, to a place in the Government. ‘The Pretender and all that set,’ wrote Mann, at Florence, to Horace Walpole, ‘are in high spirits and flatter themselves more than ever. I don’t know but they have reason. I confess to you I should be very sorry to see the Duke of Argyle with an army; then, might the Pretender, in my opinion, triumph.’ [Sidenote: _CHESTERFIELD’S OPINIONS._] The Jacobites found, perhaps, unconscious supporters of their cause in the writers who energetically denounced the reigning monarch’s partiality for Hanover, at the cost of England. Atterbury himself could not have turned this subject more profitably to the cause of the Chevalier than Chesterfield did in the first number of ‘Old England’ (Feb. 5th, 1743):――‘I am entirely persuaded that in the words, “_our present happy_ _establishment_,” the happiness meant there is that of the subjects; and that if the “establishment” should make the Prince happy, and the subjects otherwise, it would be very justly termed “_our present unhappy establishment_.” I apprehend the nation did not think James unworthy of the Crown, merely that he might make way for the Prince of Orange; nor can I conceive that they ever precluded themselves from dealing by King William in the same manner as they had done by King James, if he had done as much to deserve such a treatment. Neither can I in all my search find that when the Crown was settled in an hereditary line upon the present Royal Family, the people of Great Britain ever signed any formal instrument of recantation by which they expressed their sorrow and repentance of what they had done against King James, and protested that they would never do so by any future Prince, though reduced to the same melancholy necessity.’ The ‘sacred right of insurrection’ was here maintained, as fully as any Jacobite could have maintained it, against a family whose possession of the Crown of England was not by right of blood, but because the nation