brought by a private demandant against a wrongful tenant. Nor
could it be pretended that William had bestowed his favours less
judiciously than Charles and James. Those who were least friendly
to the Dutch would hardly venture to say that Portland, Zulestein
and Ginkell was less deserving of the royal bounty than the
Duchess of Cleveland and the Duchess of Portsmouth, than the
progeny of Nell Gwynn, than the apostate Arlington or the butcher
Jeffreys. The opposition, therefore, sullenly assented to what
the ministry proposed. From that moment the scheme was doomed.
Everybody affected to be for it; and everybody was really against
it. The three bills were brought in together, read a second time
together, ordered to be committed together, and were then, first
mutilated, and at length quietly dropped.

In the history of the financial legislation of this session,
there were some episodes which deserve to be related. Those
members, a numerous body, who envied and dreaded Montague readily
became the unconscious tools of the cunning malice of Sunderland,
whom Montague had refused to defend in Parliament, and who,
though detested by the opposition, contrived to exercise some
influence over that party through the instrumentality of Charles
Duncombe. Duncombe indeed had his own reasons for hating
Montague, who had turned him out of the place of Cashier of the
Excise. A serious charge was brought against the Board of
Treasury, and especially against its chief. He was the inventor
of Exchequer Bills; and they were popularly called Montague's
notes. He had induced the Parliament to enact that those bills,
even when at a discount in the market, should be received at par
by the collectors of the revenue. This enactment, if honestly
carried into effect, would have been unobjectionable. But it was