Tooke certainly made Sir F. Burdett a puppet to carry on his hostility against those ministers who had persecuted him, and aimed a deadly blow at his life. Mr. Tooke was a man of profound talent, a persevering friend of liberty, and an implacable foe to the measures of Mr. Pitt. But he only supported partial, not general liberty: he was no friend of universal suffrage; he supported the householder, or rather the direct tax paying suffrage. To those who contended for universal suffrage, namely, the Duke of Richmond, Major Cartwright, and others, he made this comprehensive, intelligible reply, "You may go all the way to Windsor, if you please, but I shall stop short at Hounslow;" thus implying, that he was not prepared to give political freedom to more than one half of the people, that he would not go farther than Hounslow, which is not half way to Windsor. Sir Francis Burdett gloried in being thought a disciple of Mr. Tooke. The Sunday parties at Wimbledon were composed of the disaffected persons in London and Westminster. Amongst the number stood pre-eminent the noted Charing-Cross tailor, Frank Place, who was always an avowed republican _by profession;_ poor Samuel Miller, the shoemaker, in Skinner-street, Snow-hill; poor old Thomas Hardy, and many others, with whom I did not become acquainted till some time after this period, though I collected their characters from my friend Clifford. Mr. Thelwall had cut the concern, and set up in another line, that of a fashionable teacher of elocution. At this period my taste leaned more to the sports of the field, to hunting, shooting, and fishing, than to any thing else; and as these amusements were more congenial to my habits and my large farming concerns in the country, I never, while I was the first time in prison, sought much for political information, though I necessarily heard a great deal of politics from my friends Waddington and Clifford, as well as from numerous political characters with whom I became acquainted, in consequence of their coming to visit the former gentleman. Indeed, seldom a day passed without seeing some half dozen or half score of them. Mr. Waddington's friends were almost all opposition men in politics; but his relations were one and all backbone loyalists, or rather royalists.