Page:History of England (Macaulay) Vol 3.djvu/121

 business it is to keep the communications clear, were exaggerated with all the artifices of rhetoric. One of the alien mercenaries had backed his horse against an honest citizen who pressed forward to catch a glimpse of the royal canopy. Another had rudely pushed back a woman with the but end of his musket. On such grounds as these the strangers were compared to those Lord Danes whose insolence, in the old time, had provoked the Anglosaxon population to insurrection and massacre. But there was no more fertile theme for censure than the coronation medal, which really was absurd in design and mean in execution. A chariot appeared conspicuous on the reverse; and plain people were at a loss to understand what this emblem had to do with William and Mary. The disaffected wits solved the difficulty by suggesting that the artist meant to allude to that chariot which a Roman princess, lost to all filial affection, and blindly devoted to the interests of an ambitious husband, drove over the still warm remains of her father. A specimen of the prose which the Jacobites wrote on this subject will be found in the Somers Tracts. The Jacobite verses were generally too loathsome to be quoted. I select some of the most decent lines from a very rare lampoon  "The eleventh of April has come about, To Westminster went the rabble rout, In order to crown a bundle of clouts, A dainty fine King indeed.  "Descended he is from the Orange tree; But, if I can read his destiny, He'll once more descend from another tree, A dainty fine King indeed.  "He has gotten part of the shape of a man, But more of a monkey, deny it who can; He has the head of a goose, but the legs of a crane, A dainty fine King indeed." A Frenchman named Le Noble, who had been banished from his own country for his crimes, but, by the connivance of the police, lurked in Paris, and earned a precarious livelihood as a bookseller's hack published on this occasion two pasquinades, now extremely scarce, "Le Couronnement de Guillemot et de Guillemette, avec le Sermon du grand Docteur Burnet," and "Le Festin de Guillemot." In wit, taste and good sense, Le Noble's writings are not inferior to the English poem which I have quoted. He tells us that the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of London had a boxing match in the Abbey; that the champion rode up the Hall on an ass, which turned restive and kicked over the royal table with all the plate; and that the banquet ended in a fight between the peers armed with stools and benches, and the cooks armed with spits. This sort of pleasantry, strange to say, found readers; and the writer's portrait was pompously engraved with the motto "Latrantes ride: to tua fama manet."