would have been looked upon as simply libellous and intolerable, not to say in many cases treasonable.

No. 45 of the North Briton, published on the 23rd of April, 1763, came out immediately after the king had closed, with a speech from his own lips, the parliamentary session of April, 1763. Referring to the peace lately concluded with France and Spain-a peace, the terms of which, considering the important successes of the British arms, had created the profoundest disgust in England, and for agreeing to which Lord Bute was vehemently accused, and even charged with having received bribes from the nation's enemies-the king said it had been concluded on terms " so honourable to my crown, and so beneficial to my people." The words fell coldly on the ears of the members of Parliament, and excited great anger in the breasts of most of their representatives. The North Briton expressed the feelings of the advanced Liberals of the day, though in terins that were then at least considered scurrilous in the extreme. The king's words were commented upon with merciless severity, but they were designated as part of the "minister's " speech, the writer carefully distinguishing, in accordance with constitutional practice, between the king, who can do no wrong, and the minister, who can.

The article was received with satisfaction by those who disliked the Government, and who looked upon the North Briton as the champion, rough and ill-bred, perhaps, but still the champion of public liberty; but by the ministers it was regarded as a wilful and impardonable insult to the king. Unwisely they determined to notice it, and Lord Halifax, Secretary of State, issued his warrant for the arrest of "the authors, printers, and publishers" of the obnoxious article. Wilkes was arrested on the 30th of April, and after examination before Lords Halifax and Egremont, was sent a prisoner to the Tower. His private papers were also seized. Before giving an account of the proceedings taken upon his arrest, and of those further measures which flowed as a consequence out of them, it will be well to give some account of Wilkes himself, and to show how he came to be identified with popular liberty, an event which his connection with the North Briton would scarcely have brought about.

John Wilkes was born in 1727, the son of a distiller, who left him with a good business and ample means for carrying it on; but the young man disliked occupation, and, like others who do so, got into mischief. He relinquished the business, squandered his patrimony in riotous living, and became known as a wit of the coarser kind, a fast liver, and an adventurer. For a time he was steadied by his marriage, an event by which he acquired a fortune; but he grew tired of his wife, and spent her money, and then went into Parliament to retrieve his position. He was returned for Aylesbury in 1757, and sat as member for some time; but he was not a successful man in the House of Commons, where his peculiar talents were not appreciated, and his style of oratory was out of place. He was more at home in taverns and behind the scenes at theatres; and, in company with Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord Sandwich, and other men of pleasure, he became notorious as one of the licentious inmates of Medmenham Abbey, near Maidenhead, where revels of the most ungodly kind were carried on, and where morality and religion were alike ostentatiously set at nought.

Ruined by his extravagance and by the expenses of his elections, for he had to fight for his seat at Aylesbury both in 1757 and 1761, Wilkes cast about for some employment under the Government, by which he might at all events live comfortably. Lord Temple, the friend and relative of Pitt, had favoured him in politics, seeing many good points in him, and deeming that his abilities under good guidance might be useful in the contest which was inevitably coming on between the Crown and the Parliament. To Lord Temple Wilkes applied, in hope of getting an appointment as ambassador, or as colonial governor; but the lieutenant-colonelcy of the Bucks Militia was all that he could get; and when, in 1761, Lord Temple seceded from the Government, Wilkes' chances disappeared altogether, for from Lord Bute, to whose adverse influence he ascribed his disappointment hitherto, he could expect nothing. Wilkes then betook himself to political writing against the Government, wrote a pamphlet full of hostile criticism on the lately-concluded peace, and in June, 1762, started the North Briton in conjunction with Churchill, a spirit more wicked than himself. In this paper were published from time to time most violent attacks on the

conduct of the ministers, whose names were printed at length in order to prevent the possibility of mistake, and in order to make the attack more felt.

The articles were always written from the popular side, and were calculated to make political capital for the writer, espe cially when they were upon those topics as the cider tax, and the peace-which the people had particularly at heart. Wilkes appealed, in writing them, to the popular passions, but succeeded in steering clear of expressions which could properly be construed into treason.

The North Briton was no respecter of persons, even Sir Francis Dashwood, Wilkes' former boon companion, being severely handled in it as soon as he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. No one was secure from the bite of the literary mosquito, and Wilkes, being known as the principal purveyor of its sting, was subjected on several occasions to the resentment of those he libelled. Lord Talbot fought a duel with him on Bagshot Heath. and there were other persons who took more questionable means to be revenged on him. It is more than likely that Wilkes would have gone on with the North Briton, either until he had been quieted by a good Government appointment, or until the accession of more popular ministers had left him without employment as a political writer, but for the proceedings which the ministers commenced against him. As soon as he was arrested on account of the articles in which he had given expression, albeit savagely, to the popular opinion, he was looked upon as a political martyr, and his writings in the North Briton were magnified into a series of sustained, patriotic efforts on behalf of the popular cause.

No time was lost in serving out a writ of Habeas Corpus. Wilkes was, on the 3rd of May, brought before Lord Chief Justice Pratt in the Court of Common Pleas, where arguments were heard on both sides as to the propriety of the prisoner's commitment, the question being, not whether the general warrant under which he had been arrested was valid or not, but whether, as a member of Parliament, he was not protected by the privilege of that assembly. There is a privilege attaching to the dignity of representative of the people which exempts the person of the holder from arrest on civil process, and absolutely from arrest except on a charge of treason, felony, or breach of the peace. The crown lawyers contended that a libel was a breach of the peace, and they cited the opinions of the judges who committed the Seven Bishops, in support of their view-a precedent which, the circumstances considered, they were rather unfortunate in using. The court took time to consider their judgment, and the prisoner, highly elated by the reception he had met with on his way to Westminster, and in Westminster Hall, was led back to the Tower, amid the acclamations of the multitude. On the fourth day afterwards the court gave judgment in favour of the prisoner. "We are all of opinion," said Chief Justice Pratt (afterwards Lord Camden), "that a libel is not a breach of the peace; it tends to a breach of the peace, and that is the utmost. But that which only tends to a breach of the peace cannot be an actual breach of it. In the case of the Seven Bishops, Judge Powell, the only honest man of the four judges, dissented, and I am bound to be of his opinion, and to say that case is not law

Let Mr. Wilkes be discharged from his imprisonment." Released from prison, Wilkes began to make reprisals. He brought actions against the Secretary of State and his messengers for having taken his papers; he threatened Lord Egrmont with a challenge, and he set up a private printing-press in his house, from which he could issue squibs and pamphlets under his own immediate direction. The rejoicings in London and the provinces at the triumph of what was considered to be the popular cause, were general and demonstrative; Wilkes became the hero of the hour, and his name was associated with the sacred name of liberty, in the rallying cry of the people.

On the 15th of November, 1763, Parliament met after the recess, and to the surprise of every one, Lord Sandwich, who had been an associate of Wilkes in his profligate career, and whose morals were certainly no better than his companion's. rose in his place in the House of Lords, and on the very first day of the session, denounced as a scandalous, obscene, and impious libel, a performance of Wilkes called "An Essay on Woman." The poem was a burlesque on Pope's "Essay on Man," and was dedicated to Lord Sandwich, having been written by Wilkes several years before in the days of Medmenham Abbey. It contained scurrilous references to various public men,

among others the Bishop of Gloucester (Warburton), and Lord Sandwich himself. It was on the point of insult to the bishop, however, that the Earl of Sandwich denounced the work as a breach of privilege. Only fourteen copies had been printed at Wilkes' private press, but of this number the Government got hold of one, and this was the copy to which the attention of the House of Lords was invited. In the same book was a lewd paraphrase of the "Veni Creator," and the House of Lords, after some discussion, voted both the poems to be blasphemous and breaches of privilege, but adjourned the further consideration of them for forty-eight hours, in order to give Wilkes time to defend himself.

In the House of Commons, at the same time that the Lords were coming to this vote, Wilkes rose to complain of the breach of privilege which had been committed in arresting him; whereupon Lord North, one of the ministers, and the AttorneyGeneral, Sir Fletcher Norton, caused the depositions of the printers who had confessed that Wilkes wrote No. 45 of the North Briton, to be read, and asked the House to authorise proceedings at law. After some discussion the House voted No. 45 to be a false, scandalous, and seditious libel, tending to traitorous insurrections, and ordered it to be burnt by the common hangman.

One result of the debate was a duel between Wilkes and Mr. Samuel Martin, a member who had spoken of the writer, whoever he might be, of certain other personal articles in the North Briton, as a cowardly, malignant, and infamous scoundrel." Wilkes sent Martin a letter repeating the accusations made in the North Briton, and avowing the authorship of them. At the meeting, Wilkes was badly wounded in the body, but as soon as he could be moved he went to France, to hide himself from the storm which he saw was about to burst upon him. The House of Commons expelled him from their body, the House of Peers asked the Crown to prosecute him for his "Essay on Woman," and when, after some time, he failed to appear in answer to the indictments which were preferred against him, the courts of law pronounced sentence of outlawry against him. Then resolutions, with reference to the late decision of the Chief Justice, were passed through both Houses of Parliament, to the effect "that privilege of Parliament does not extend to the case of writing and publishing seditious libels." Even the Earl of Chatham, while objecting to the words and form of the resolutions, was careful not to speak in favour of the subject of them, whom he described as unworthy "to be ranked among the human species; he is the blasphemer of his God, and the libeller of his king."

For five years Wilkes lived abroad, afraid of the outlawry, and seeing no chance, in the state of politics which existed during that time, of making his peace with the Government. In 1768, an attempt which he made towards that end failed, and Wilkes resolved to make a bold dash upon the popular favour as the means of his getting back again. He came over at the dissolution of Parliament in the same year, and put up for the representation of London, but not succeeding in the city, he went to the county, and beat the Government candidates in the contest for Middlesex.

As soon as Parliament assembled, a question was raised whether Mr. Wilkes, being an outlaw, could sit; and when, on Wilkes surrendering, as he had promised to do, at the court of King's Bench, the outlawry was declared null and void on technical grounds, a further question arose upon the judgments to which he submitted himself, on account of his "Essay on Woman" and No. 45. Wilkes was fined £1,000, and sentenced to two years' imprisonment; the mob rescued him, and swore he should be at liberty, but he evaded their kindness, and surrendered at the King's Bench prison. Riots followed in St. George's Fields on account of "Wilkes and Liberty," and the troops having been called out, several persons were shot.

In prison, Wilkes, who was looked upon as a man persecuted for political conscience' sake, was visited by many of the leading liberal politicians, and continued to write fervid letters to his friends on public affairs. Having in one of these commented on Lord Weymouth's letter to the Lambeth magistrates, warning them of an apprehended riot, and advising them to apply for troops, he described the advice as "a hellish project," tending to "a horrid massacre." For this he was brought in custody to the bar of the House, where his letter was condemned as an "insolent libel;" and on the 3rd of February, 1769, Lord Barrington, after recapitulating Wilkes' offences, and the judg

ment against him, carried by a large majority a vote expelling him the House.

By a majority of 800 votes, the Middlesex electors immediately returned him again, but the House of Commons declared that he could not sit, and that Colonel Luttrell, who had not polled more than 300 votes, was duly returned. The Middlesex men were furious; Lord Chatham warmly reprehended the vote of the House of Commons, and Lord Camden resigned the Great Seal rather than continue in a Government which upheld that vote.

In April, 1770, Wilkes was released from prison, and having been, while still in durance, elected alderman of Farringdon Ward Without, was sworn in, and forthwith threw himself once more into politics. But eight years had wrought a change in public affairs; Wilkes' old occupation was to a great extent gone; and he himself, made wiser by experience, was anxious to exchange the part of a mere agitator for some more staple position. Though he continued to be a staunch Liberal, he was less noisy in ventilating his opinions; and, as a magistrate, he conducted himself with great propriety, and increased his reputation with the better class of citizens. In 1775 he was chosen Lord Mayor, and having been once more returned to Parliament for the county of Middlesex, was allowed to sit without question. In the end he became city chamberlain, an office which he filled with ability and success; and so little did this old demagogue habit survive in him, that when, in 1782, he moved in the House of Commons that the resolutions respecting his own expulsion should be expunged, there was not found any enemy to gainsay him.

Accident made Wilkes a political hero, accident bound him up in the affections of the people with the cause of public liberty, but it does not seem that on the whole he was unworthy of his position; and while we cannot fail utterly to condemn the immorality by which his earlier life was marked, to condemn, also, the tone in which he vindicated the principles he professed, we cannot refuse some share of admiration for the popular favourite, nor can we fail to see the meaning of those who identified him with the cause that was symbolised by the cry of "Wilkes and Liberty!"

LESSONS IN ARCHITECTURE.-VIII. EXPLANATION OF SOME OF THE TERMS USED IN ARCHITECTURE.

IT is now time to give an explanation of the terms used in speaking of the different orders of architecture. Among the Greeks, an order was composed of columns and an entablature. The Romans added pedestals under the columns of various orders, to increase their height. The column is generally a round pillar, constructed either to support or to adorn an edifice.

Besides columns, the Greeks employed human figures to support the entablature. Vitruvius informs us that when male figures were employed, they were called Persians, to indicate the contempt in which that nation was held; and they represented these figures, accordingly, in the most suffering posture, and loading them, as it were, with the heaviest entablature, that of the Doric order; and when female figures were used, they were called Caryatides, to signify their contempt for the Carians, whose wives had been taken away captive in their wars with the Athenians. Some critics doubt the truth of these stories of Vitruvius, and endeavour to account for the origin of the figures and their names in a different manner. Whether the Greeks were the inventors of this mode of supporting entablatures, or copied it from the ancient Egyptian edifices, or from the tombs and temples of India and Persia, it is needless to inquire. Fragments of male figures, apparently employed for the same purposes, have been found among the ancient Roman monumental remains.

The pilaster is a square pillar used for the same purpose as the column. Instead of standing isolated like the column, it is generally inserted in the wall of an edifice, showing only a fourth or a fifth of its thickness. Pilasters have their bases, capitals, and entablatures with the same parts, heights, and projections as columns have; and they are distinguished, like them, by the names of the five orders of architecture-Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, and Composite. They are supposed

to be of Roman origin, as they only appear in the later periods of Greek architecture, and they are much more numerous in the Roman monuments. Vitruvius calls them parastatæ, from the Greek Tapa (para), near or by, and iornu (his-tee'-mi), I stand, because of their standing close to a building, or forming part of it. The Greeks, though they did use pilasters in their designs, had a kind of square pillars at the end of their walls, which they called anta, and which sometimes projected a good way from the principal front. They were also at the entrances to a building.

Attics were a sort of low square pillars with their cornices, which originated in Athens, and were used in buildings to conoeal the roof. These were ranged in a continued line, and raised above the rest of the structure, in front of the roof, so as to hide it entirely, presenting a new order, as it were, above that of the building. The Greek attics are not now to be found among the ruins of Athens. Roman attics are seen in the remains

base is that part of the column which is beneath the shaft and upon the pedestal, when a pedestal is used. It has a plinth, a member of a flat and square form like a brick, called in Greek TAveos (plin'-thos), with mouldings that represent rings, with which the bottoms of pillars were bound, to prevent their cleaving. These rings, when large, are called tori, and when small, astragals. The tori have generally hollow spaces cut round between each torus. This hollow is called a rundel, scotia, or trochilus.

The shaft of the column is the round and even part extending from the base to the capital. This part of the column is narrower at the top than at the bottom. Some architects would give the column a greater breadth at the third part of its height than at the bottom of the shaft. There is no instance of this being practised among the ancients. Others make the shaft a cylinder from the bottom to the third part of its height, and thus lessen it from this to the top; and some

which exhibit these attics, but they appear to be of

different proportions,some being nearly one-half of. the height of the order. The moderns make the height of the attics equal to that of the entablature. A series of

columns, separate or connected, used

in the support of an entablature, is called a colonnade. It receives a specific name from the number of columns employed; as, tetrastyle, when there are four, from the Greek TETρz (tet'-ra), four, and σTUλos (sty'los), a column; hexastyle, when there are six; octostyle, when eight; and decastyle, when ten. The space between the columns is called the intercolumniation. There are five kinds of intercolumniation-namely, the areostyle, or thinly set, where the columns are at the distance of four diameters of the column; the diastyle, when they are at the distance of three diameters; the eustyle, when at a distance of two and a quarter; the systyle, when at two; and the pycnostyle, or thickly set, when at one diameter and a half. Of these, the eustyle was most generally used by the ancient architects. Other names have been given to the intercolumniation of the Doric order, according to the number of the triglyphs placed over them, as monotriglyph, when there was one; ditriglyph, when there were two, etc. Coupled, grouped, or clustered columns appear not to have been used by the ancients, with some apparent exceptions at Rome.

Every column, except the Doric, to which the Romans give no base, is composed of a base, a shaft, and a capital. The

COMPOSITE.

trave repre

sents a beam,

and lies im

mediately above the capitals of the columns: the Greeks called it epistylion. The word ar chitrave is derived partly from the

Greek, and partly from the Latin, being compounded of the Greek apxos (ar'kos), chief, or principal, and the Latin trabs, a beam. The frieze is the space between the architrave and the cornice. The cornice is composed of several mouldings, which project over each other and shelter the order from the rain.

The pedestal is cubical in form, and consists of three parts: (1) the base or foot, which stands on the area or pavement; (2) the die or middle part, which rests upon the base; and (3) the cornice or wave, upon which the column is placed. Pedestals appear to have been introduced into architecture after the loss of political independence in Greece. In the early examples of Greek architecture, the columns are generally formed standing on the uppermost of two or three steps. When the Romans elevated the floors of their temples, they were obliged to discontinue the erection of front stairs, because they occupied so much ground around the building, and to adopt the pedestal raised to a level with the top of the stairs, and projecting to the front of the steps which profiled it on all sides. Vitruvius makes no mention of pedestals, in treating of the Doric, Tuscan, and Corinthian orders; and in treating of the Ionic, speaks of the pedestal as a part of the construction, but not of the order.