have ever since been considered illegal." However, the release of Wilkes on the ground of his parliamentary privilege gave him but a momentary triumph, or rather respite. The prosecution was not abated by the decision that he could not be imprisoned before trial; while one effect of his liberation was to stimulate the minister to add another count to the indictment preferred against him, on which he might be expected to find it less easy to excite the sympathy of any party. Wilkes had not always confined his literary efforts to political pamphlets. There was a club named the Franciscans (in compliment to Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord Bute's Chancellor of the Exchequer, who, as well as Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, was one of its members), which met at Medmenham Abbey, on the banks of the Thames, and there held revels whose license recalled the worst excesses of the preceding century. To this club Wilkes also belonged; and, in indulgence of tastes in harmony with such a brotherhood, he had composed a blasphemous and indecent parody on Pope's "Essay on Man," which he entitled "An Essay on Woman," and to which he appended a body of burlesque notes purporting to be the composition of Pope's latest commentator, the celebrated Dr. Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester. He had never published it (indeed, it may be doubted whether, even in that not very delicate age, any publisher could have been found to run the risk of issuing so scandalous a work), but he had printed a few copies in his own house, of which he designed to make presents to such friends as he expected to appreciate it. He had not, however, so far as it appears, given away a single copy, when, on the very first day of the next session of Parliament, Lord Sandwich himself brought the parody under the notice of the House of Lords. If there was a single member of the House whose delicacy was not likely to be shocked, and whose morals could not be injured by such a composition, it was certainly Lord Sandwich himself; but his zeal as a minister to support his chief kindled in him a sudden enthusiasm for the support of virtue and decency also; and, having obtained a copy by some surreptitious means, he now made a formal complaint of it to the House, contending that the use of the name of the Bishop of Gloucester as author of the notes constituted a breach of the privileges of the House. And he was seconded by the bishop himself, whose temper and judgment were, unhappily, very inferior to his learning and piety. It is recorded that he actually compared Wilkes to the devil, and then apologized to Satan for the comparison. But the Lords were in a humor to regard no violence against Wilkes as excessive; and, submitting to the guidance of the minister and the prelate, resolved that the "Essay on Woman,"[10] as also another poem by the same writer, a paraphrase of the "Veni Creator," was "a most scandalous, obscene, and impious libel," and