His father had trained him to history and antiquities; and he early suckled his own political genius with scribbling journals and pamphlets. Towards the decline of Sir Robert Walpole’s power, he had created himself a leader of the Independents, a contemptible knot of desperate tradesmen,[45] many of them converted to Jacobitism by being detected and fined at the Custom-house for contraband practices. By those people he was shoved into Parliament on the expulsion of Lord Sundon and Sir Charles Wager; but having written that masterly pamphlet called “Faction Detected,” in defence of Lord Bath’s political apostasy, the patron and champion mutually lost their popularity, and nothing was openly remembered of Lord Percival’s works, but a ridiculous history[46] of his own family, which he had collected and printed at an immense expense. Thus exploded, he was very willing to take sanctuary with his leader in the House of Lords; but the Ministry did not think his sting formidable enough to extract it by so dear an operation: how often since has Mr. Pelham wished him laid up in ermine! At the beginning of this Parliament, rejected by Westminster, and countenanced nowhere, he bought the loss of an election at Weobley, for which place, however, on a petition, Mr. Fox procured him to be returned by Parliament, and had immediately the satisfaction of finding him declare against the Court, declared a Lord of the Bedchamber to the Prince, and, on the first occasion, the warmest antagonist of the Duke and the Mutiny Bill. On Lord Trentham’s being opposed at Westminster last year, Lord Egmont tried, by every art and industry, to expiate his offences in the eyes of his old electors, and was the great engine of the contest there. All the morning he passed at the hustings; then came to the House, where he was a principal actor; and all the evening he passed at hazard; not to mention the hours he spent in collecting materials for his speeches, or in furnishing them to his weekly mercenaries. With this variety of life, he was as ignorant of the world as a child, and knew nothing of mankind though he had acted every part in it. But it is time to continue the history of the Mutiny Bill, and to conclude with the conclusion of his Lordship’s memoirs of his family and himself--“let us here leave this young nobleman struggling for the dying liberties of his country!”