sings Pope in the _Dunciad_ with reckless inaccuracy. In 1703, De Foe, for his _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_, was condemned to stand thrice in the Pillory before the Royal Exchange, near the Conduit in Cheapside, and at Temple Bar. The mob, he tells us, treated him very well, and cheered long and loud when he was taken out of what he calls a “Hieraglyphick state machine; Contrived to punish fancy in” (_Hymn to the Pillory_). He comforts himself by reflecting that the learned Selden narrowly escaped it, and turns the whole thing to ridicule; but then mutilation was no port of the sentence. Pope’s reference to John Tutchin is still wider of the mark. Tutchin, having narrowly escaped death for his share in Monmouth’s rebellion, was sentenced by Jeffreys, on his famous Western Circuit (1685), to seven years’ imprisonment, during which he must, once a year, be whipped through every market-town in Dorsetshire. The very clerk of the court was moved to protest that this meant a whipping once a fortnight; but the sentence remained. Out of bravado, or in desperation, the prisoner petitioned the King to be hanged instead of whipped; but, in the result, he was neither whipped nor hanged. He fell ill of the small-pox; passion cooled; and, intelligently bribing, he escaped, to visit Jeffreys in the Tower. Apparently he went to gloat, but remained to accept the ruined Chancellor’s explanation, that he had only obeyed instructions. “So after he had treated Mr. _Tutchin_ with a glass of wine, Mr. _Tutchin_ went away.”