Smithfield; the French Ambassador made a Duke, with precedence; Cape Breton given back to the French, with Gibraltar and Port Mahon to the Spaniards; the Pope's nuncio entering London, and the Lord Mayor and Aldermen kissing his feet; an office opened in Drury Lane for the sale of papistical Pardons and Indulgences; with the like prophecies calculated to arouse the bigotry of the lower and middle orders, and to lash them into a religious as well as a political frenzy. For a cry of "No Popery" has ever acted upon a true-born Englishman as a red rag does on a bull. Perhaps the thing that went best down of all Mr. Fielding's drolleries, and tickled the taste of the town most amazingly, was the passage where he made his honest London tradesman enter in his diary to this effect: "My little boy Jacky taken ill of the itch. He had been on the parade with his godfather the day before to see the Life Guards, and had just touched one of their plaids." One of the King's Ministers said long afterwards that this passage touching the itch was worth two regiments of horse to the cause of Government. At this distance of time one doesn't see much wit in a scurrilous lampoon, of which the gist was to taunt one's neighbours with being afflicted with a disease of the skin: and, indeed, the lower ranks of English were, in those days, anything but free from similar ailments, and, in London at least, were in their persons and manners inconceivably filthy. But 'tis astonishing what a mark you can make with a coarse jest, if you only go far enough, and forswear justice and decency.