 of always voting with the minister. A fortnight however did not pass before the impossibility of this was made self-evident.
He had consented to the purchase of a borough,

because he had been told that such things are as openly sold as shoes and stockings, or any other article that a man chuses to appropriate to himself, upon paying its full value, or perhaps a little more, but to support that it was noon-day at mid-night—or indeed any of those many positions he was almost ordered to second—to hold forth for three hours to the great detriment of his lungs, and, what is worse, of his varacity, with a view, like legerdemain, of shewing a question in every possible point of view but the right, and then sanction this outrage on truth, this fraud on his own conscience, by voting that it might be carried into a law, and so be accessary to the multiplying of these outrages and these frauds to the detriment of his fellow citizens!—this was a condition he could not prevail on himself to fulfil, and therefore—at which he wondered, without cause—the parliament being dissolved in about five months after he took his seat, our hero's borough, notwithstanding a fresh three thousand pounds which he laid out in contestation—though how it should be spent is astonishing, for the place had not above thirteen houses—received its former member, Mr. Stopgap, who, as complaisantly as before, in less than a twelve-month took again the Chiltern hundreds, that the borough might be purchased by a new bubble, who however bought it with better success than our hero, for, by always

saying aye, he soon got a pension well worth the money he had paid for it.
By the way, Charles's conduct in parliament was the most curious thing in nature. Having no bias but truth, his opinions seemed to wear a very motley and strange appearance, to those who were hackneyed in the way of debate; but indeed he was, as Kiddy would call it, up with them; for even those who argued on the same side, by having imbibed a passion for rhetoric, a quaintness of expression, a vein of drollery, or some other quality of embellishing and flattering truth out of the very form they ought to wish it should wear, appeared to him the most unhandy handlers of an argument that could be conceived. In short, he was an innovator, and nobody was sorry to lose him; for, said they, a man who votes sometimes on one side, and sometimes on the other, can be of no party
