There was a desire to bring the matter to a conclusion as cheaply as possible. The ‘Craftsman’ recommended that the Pretender should be ‘cut off,’ if that end could be compassed. A hope was expressed that the nation would not be taxed for encountering a ‘ragged, hungry rabble of Yahoos of Scotch Highlanders,’ with the cost of an expedition against an Alexander. There would be no use, it was said, in constructing an apparatus fit for hunting a lion,――for the catching of a rat. The rats were, nevertheless, troublesome, if not formidable. The London Jacobites were ostentatiously ecstatic when news reached town of the defeat of Cope. King George’s proclamation had ordered an observation of silence on public affairs. When the removal of notorious Papists from the city had been contemplated, ‘What will you get,’ loudly asked the Jacobites of the Romish Church, ‘by driving us ten miles out of town? We shall then form a camp, and you will find us a much more formidable body than we now appear to be while dispersed among you.’ Remove the Papists! why, the Duke of Newcastle had shown so little disposition that way, that his French cook still ruled supreme in the kitchen of his mansion in Lincoln’s Inn Fields! There were others like the duke; and, what trust could be placed in a militia formed out of servants of noblemen whose lackeys went to mass in the private chapels of the Ambassadors? Yet, something must be done. It was in vain that proclamations, signed ‘James III.’ and ‘Charles Edward,’ were burnt at the Royal Exchange, by the common hangman, in presence of the sheriffs. New documents were circulated as widely as ever. If they were not cried in the street, there were other ways of bringing them before the public. In the dusk of the evening, a baker would rest with his basket, or a street porter with his burthen, against a wall. Inside the basket, as inside the porter’s burthen, there was a little boy who had all the necessary contrivances to enable him to paste a Jacobite paper on the wall. In the morning, London was found to be covered with treasonable documents, and for some time, magistrates were driven almost mad in trying to account for the appearance of papers which seemed to have got on the walls by inexplicable and undiscoverable means. [Sidenote: _THE VENETIAN AMBASSADOR._]