So bad was the aspect of things that it was rumoured that King William would abdicate; and this aggravating the general uncertainty, many in high places spent their days in a dreadful looking forward to judgment; nor ever, I believe, slept without dreaming of Tower Hill, the axe, and the sawdust. The result that was natural followed. While many hastened to make a secret peace with St. Germain's, others, either as a matter of conscience or because they felt that they had offended too deeply, remained constant; but perceiving treachery in the air, and being in daily fear of invasion, breathed nothing but threats and slaughter against the seceders. This begot a period of plots and counter-plots, of perjury and intrigue, of denunciations and accusations real and feigned, such as I believe no other country has ever known; the Jacobites considering a restoration certain, and the time only doubtful; while the Whigs in their hearts were inclined to agree with them and feared the worst. During seven such years I lived and worked with Mr. Brome; who, partly, I think, because he had come late to his political bearings, and partly because the Tories and Jacobites had a newswriter in the notorious Mr. Dyer--to whose letters Mr. Dryden, it was said, would sometimes contribute--remained steadfast in his Whig opinions; and did no little in the country parts to lessen the stir which the Nonjurors' complaints created. I saw much of him and little of others; and being honestly busy and honourably employed--not that my style made any noise in the coffee-houses, which was scarcely to be expected, since it passed for Mr. Brome's--I began to regard my life before I came to London as an ugly dream. Yet it had left me with two proclivities which are not common at the age which I had then reached; the one a love of solitude and a retired life, which, a matter of necessity at first, grew by-and-by into a habit; the other an averseness for women that amounted almost to a fear of them. Mr. Brome, who was a confirmed bachelor, did nothing to alter my views on either point, or to reconcile me to the world; and as my life was passed between my attic in Bride Lane and his apartment in Fleet Street, where he had a tolerable library, few were better acquainted with public affairs or had less experience of private, than I; or knew more intimately the order of the signs and the aspect of the houses between the Fleet Prison and St. Dunstan's Church.