Through the whole reign of George the First, and through nearly half of the reign of George the Second, a Tory was regarded as an enemy of the reigning house, and was excluded from all the favours of the Crown.  Though most of the country gentlemen were Tories, none but Whigs were created peers and baronets.  Though most of the clergy were Tories, none but Whigs were appointed deans and bishops.  In every county, opulent and well descended Tory squires complained that their names were left out of the commission of the peace, while men of small estate and mean birth, who were for toleration and excise, septennial parliaments and standing armies, presided at quarter-sessions, and became deputy lieutenants.

By degrees some approaches were made towards a reconciliation.  While Walpole was at the head of affairs, enmity to his power induced a large and powerful body of Whigs, headed by the heir-apparent of the throne, to make an alliance with the Tories, and a truce even with the Jacobites.  After Sir Robert’s fall, the ban which lay on the Tory party was taken off.  The chief places in the administration continued to be filled with Whigs, and, indeed, could scarcely have been filled otherwise; for the Tory nobility and gentry, though strong in numbers and in property, had among them scarcely a single man distinguished by talents, either for business or for debate.  A few of them, however, were admitted to subordinate offices; and this indulgence produced a softening effect on the temper of the whole body.  The first levee of George the Second after Walpole’s resignation was a remarkable spectacle.  Mingled with the constant supporters of the House of Brunswick, with the Russells, the Cavendishes, and the Pelhams, appeared a crowd of faces utterly unknown to the pages and gentlemen-ushers, lords of rural manors, whose ale and foxhounds were renowned in the neighbourhood of the Mendip hills, or round the Wrekin, but who had never crossed the threshold of the palace since the days when Oxford, with the white staff in his hand, stood behind Queen Anne.

During the eighteen years which followed this day, both factions were gradually sinking deeper and deeper into repose.  The apathy of the public mind is partly to be ascribed to the unjust violence with which the administration of Walpole had been assailed.  In the body politic, as in the natural body, morbid languor generally succeeds morbid excitement.  The people had been maddened by sophistry, by calumny, by rhetoric, by stimulants applied to the national pride.  In the fulness of bread, they had raved as if famine had been in the land.  While enjoying such a measure of civil and religious freedom as, till then, no great society had ever known, they had cried out for a Timoleon or a Brutus to stab their oppressor to the heart.  They were in this frame of mind when the change of administration took place; and they soon found that there was to be no change whatever in the system of government.  The natural