‘Nobody is yet taken up: God knows why not!’ Such is the exclamation of Horace Walpole in a letter to Mann, on the 23rd of February, this year. Government, however, soon began the system of arrest. Colonel Cecil, supposed to be designed for the Chevalier’s Secretary of State, was captured. Papers which were found upon him compromised Lord Barrymore, the Pretender’s general, who, before day-break on a March morning, was arrested by a file of soldiers at his house in Henrietta Street, Cavendish Square. Cecil had previously removed his papers out of harm’s way; but, thinking the danger over, he had resumed possession of them. ‘These discoveries,’ says Horace Walpole, ‘go on but lamely. One may perceive who is _not_ Minister, rather than who is.’ The notorious Carte, who had been taken up under a suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, was carried before the Duke of Newcastle. ‘Are you a bishop?’ asked the duke, thinking he might be a Nonjuring prelate. ‘No, my lord duke,’ replied the Nonjuror; ‘there are no bishops in England but what are of your Grace’s own making; and I am sure I have no reason to expect that honour.’ After he was set at liberty, the saucy ‘Westminster Journal’ remarked: ‘Mr. Carte was confined for he knew not what; and discharged for he knew not why.’ [Sidenote: _CARTE’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND._] Carte, the biographer of Ormond, and the ex-secretary of Atterbury, was a man who had twice fled abroad when accounted a rebel, and who was allowed to return when he was thought to be harmless. He, this year, issued a prospectus of his intended History of England. The London municipality met the overture in a liberal spirit which did it honour, but which brought upon it the bitterest sarcasm of Horace Walpole. ‘I wish to God,’ he wrote in his anger to Mann, from Arlington Street, in July, 1744, ‘I wish to God Boccalini was living! Never was such an opportunity for Apollo’s playing off a set of fools as there is now! The good City of London, who, from long dictating to the Government, are now come to preside over taste and letters, having given one Carte, a Jacobite parson, fifty pounds a year, for seven years, to write the History of England; and four aldermen and six common-councilmen are to inspect his materials and the progress of the work. Surveyors of common-sewers turned supervisors of literature! To be sure, they think a History of England is no more than Stowe’s survey of the parishes! Instead of having books printed with the _imprimatur_ of an university, they will be printed, as churches are whitewashed, John Smith and Thomas Johnson, Churchwardens!’ Such was the light spirit with which the fine gentleman of Strawberry visited the first step taken by the London Corporation, in imitation of the ancient foreign guilds, to do honour to literature and literary men. In Carte’s case, politics were not considered. The Jacobite had given proof of his ability, and the Whigs trusted to his honesty. If his discretion had been equal to both,