Among the partisans in the City contest was Oliver Goldsmith, who put a paragraph into one of the newspapers in praise of Townshend. The same night he happened to sit next Lord Shelburne at Drury Lane; who being informed of the circumstance of the paragraph by Mr. Beauclerk, said to Goldsmith that he hoped he had mentioned nothing about Malagrida in it. "Do you know," answered Goldsmith, "that I never could conceive the reason why they call you Malagrida, for Malagrida was a very good sort of man?" The blunder, as Dr. Johnson, who was fond of the anecdote, used to observe, was one of emphasis. What Goldsmith meant was, "I wonder they should use Malagrida as a term of reproach;" but the blunder, to borrow the words of Walpole, was a picture of Goldsmith's whole life.[1]
The next move made by Wilkes was more successful. He succeeded in getting a remonstrance to the Court on the Middlesex Election drawn up in such violent terms, that he boasted that Townshend, if he presented it, would be undone, and stoned by the people if he refused; while he artfully invented a variety of reasons in order to excuse himself from attending the deputation which was to carry it to the palace.[2] The Attorney-General advised Townshend that the presentation of the remonstrance would be the publication of a libel; Glyn, the Recorder, gave a contrary opinion, adding that Townshend was obliged to present the remonstrance in virtue of his office.[3] Townshend accordingly had to submit to the hard necessities of the position in which the skill of his rival had placed him, for the language of the remonstrance was so outrageous, that popular opinion supported the King in the contemptuous reception with which he greeted both the remonstrance and the deputation which accompanied it.
Wilkes, though successful in this episode of the struggle, saw himself none the less losing ground day by day in
- ↑ Boswell's Johnson, iv. 299, 54. The story is also told in a letter from Topham Beauclerk to Lord Charlemont, November 20th, 1773 ("Charlemont Papers" in Reports of Hist. MSS. Commission, ii. 359).
- ↑ Walpole, Journals, i. 189.
- ↑ Walpole, Journals, i. 189, and Glyn's opinion amongst the Lansdowne House MSS.
