A social note worthy of being recorded, in this year, was that a man named John Frith, lieutenant of the second battalion of Royals, threw a stone at His Majesty's coach. He seems to have done no harm, and was evidently a lunatic, for no one in their senses would have endeavoured to injure a king who was just then in the zenith of his popularity. That he was insane the jury thought, for, on his trial for high treason on 21st May, he was acquitted as being of unsound mind, but he was put under safe watch and ward in Newgate, and only liberated on 11th December 1791, on bail being given to take proper care of him. * * * * * The year 1791 is remarkable for its uneventfulness, nothing of national importance occurring during the twelve-month. Impressment still went on, as we see by the _St. James's Chronicle_, April 16-19.--"Friday night the press in the Thames, and on both sides the river, was the warmest that has been at all since press warrants were last issued. No fewer than eleven gallies were rowing about between London Bridge and Deptford. Every one of His Majesty's frigates and sloops on Channel service, as well as those in the North Sea and on the Irish coast, have received orders to proceed upon the impress service. The smaller vessels, as soon as they have procured forty seamen each, are to deliver them over to the receiving ships at Spithead and the Nore." In 1787 a society was formed in England having for its object the suppression of slavery, under the auspices of Granville Sharpe, Clarkson, and others, and Mr. Wilberforce (by whose untiring efforts its downfall was at last obtained) joined it. On the 18th April 1791, the House of Commons resolved itself into a committee "to consider of the African slave trade." Wilberforce made an eloquent speech, in which he depicted the horrors of the trade. Among other barbarities he mentioned the whipping, and holding red-hot coals, to the mouths of those (in order to compel them to eat) who were desirous of putting an end to their existence, by starving themselves to death; and, to prove the preference given by those unhappy creatures of death to slavery, he quoted part of the evidence, which told how they took every opportunity of leaping overboard, and that, in the agonies of death, when drowning, they would hold up their hands for joy in having escaped from their tormentors. He mentioned many cruelties which had passed unpunished, and particularly one, which was committed by a master upon his female slave, a girl about six years old, by cutting her mouth from ear to ear; he showed how injurious the slave trade was to our mercantile navy, quoting from the muster rolls of Liverpool and Bristol, that in one year, out of 12,263 seamen employed in the slave trade, 2643 had died.