On the 23rd, Lord Gower kissed hands. The King, to show how well he could dissemble, told him he had never been happy since they parted. This was overacting insincerity. The year concluded with his Majesty making his second son, the Bishop of Osnabrugh, Knight of the Bath. The new year was opened by the publicity of an affair which, though in agitation for some months past, had been known to very few persons. It was common, particularly in Wales, for private jobbers to apply to the Treasury, and offer to make out the title of the Crown to certain lands which had been usurped from the domain, under pretence of having been grants, though often the grantees had occupied much more than had been granted. On these occasions a new grant was the condition and reward of the informer. As these suits had regarded inconsiderable property, or rather inconsiderable persons, such transactions had never occasioned clamour. The precedent was now employed by so obnoxious a man, and to the prejudice of so puissant a lord, that no marvel it occasioned loud murmurs. Among the grants bestowed by King William on his Dutch favourite, the Earl of Portland,--grants that in their day had been sounded high by Opposition, and many of which had been cancelled by Parliament,--the Duke of Portland still enjoyed the honour of Penryn, adjoining to which he likewise possessed the forest of Inglewood, which, having been part of Queen Caroline’s jointure, she had held after Penryn had been granted to Lord Portland,--a strong presumption that it made no part of what he had obtained--though on her death he or his son had entered upon it, and had enjoyed the forest to the present time. It was estimated at about eight hundred pounds a-year; but whether of that value or not, included within its precincts a large number of freemen, a material article to the Duke, who was then contesting the interest of Cumberland and Westmoreland at an unbounded expense with Sir James Lowther, one of the most opulent subjects in Britain, and who, till now, had exercised almost sovereignty over the voters of those counties. Sir James discovered the flaw in the Duke of Portland’s title, and made the usual application to the Treasury for leave to prove the defect, on condition of being gratified with what he should recover to the Crown. The application being made some months before, while Charles Townshend was alive and Chancellor of the Exchequer, he, rash and thoughtless as he was, had yet been struck with the inconveniences likely to follow from such indulgence, and had stopped it. Sir James Lowther was not only a man of a hateful character, but lay under the unpopularity of being Lord Bute’s son-in-law. The affair, too, though simple in its own nature, ultimately regarded elections, and must revive against the Scotch favourite the odium which had attended the Dutch one, when the grant was originally made. That the Duke of Portland was in Opposition