558 Nules of the Month dn fNov. 



No tenant of the Duke of Norfolk has suffered injury from liis conduct on 

 this occasion ; and it must be acknowledged that if he committed an error, he 

 has nobly repaired it, and that the Duke of Newcastle has another movement 

 to make before he places himself in a parallel position with the Duke of 

 Norfolk. — I am. Sir, your obedient servant, 



London, Oct. 24, 1829. A FRIEND TO FAIR PLAY. 



Now let us take the matter in the Papist's own showing. A number of 

 Protestant individuals who owed no obligation whatever to their Popish 

 landlord, and who, even if they did, would have been grossly culpable in 

 suffering any such consideration to interfere with the duty of preserving 

 their free constitution, and their scriptural religion, put their names to 

 a petition that both should be preserved. His Popish Grace of Nor- 

 folk, in the incurable spirit of his church, looking upon any freedom of 

 conscience in religious matters as intolerable, and, equally in the spirit 

 of his church, thinking that persecution was the legitimate Aveapon in 

 matters 6f faith, persecuted those men as far as lay in his ducal power, 

 by ordering them off his estates. There was no charge of corruption, none 

 of trafficking of any kind, none of the little pecuniary purposes that 

 sometimes bias the conduct of greater men than those poor holders of 

 his Grace the Duke of Norfolk. The head and front of their offending- 

 was, that being Protestants, they joined with their countrymen in desiring 

 that Protestantism should not be insulted and brought low. 



As to the Duke of Newcastle's case, we may leave him to explain him- 

 self, which we hope he will do, by turning off his estate every man who 

 voted for Mr. Serjeant Wilde. To enlighten the innocent on such mat- 

 ters, suppose we put a case. Let us conceive that a couple of hundred 

 " worthy and independent" blacks or blues in a northern town, hearing 

 that very considerable sums sometimes wandered about the world when 

 elections were the order of the day, and feeling the comfortlessness of 

 having no share in this floating capital, had thought of contriving a little 

 opposition in their town, setting themselves up as objects " worthy the 

 attention of any gentleman in want of" a seat in the house, and, in 

 short, turning the tenures which gave them votes into a good thing ? 



We shall not say that this has occurred at Newark, but we can safely 

 swear that its perfect fac-siraile has been exhibited in other towns by 

 the score. If in East Retford, for instance, every man who bartered his 

 vote for the candidate's pounds had been instantly stripped of his power 

 to make the same iniquitous bargain in future, we should have felt no 

 extraordinary surprise or sorrow ; or if the chief land-holder of East 

 Retford had looked upon those scoundrel traffickers with the disgust 

 which was their due, and, warned by the narrow escape of the Borough 

 from being disfranchised, had determined to punish and extinguish this 

 vile abuse wherever it lay in his way, we can feel just as little surprise. 



Mr. Serjeant Wilde was a total stranger to the people of Newark; 

 there was neither family connection, nor connection of principle. 

 The Serjeant was merely a gentleman who wanted to have a seat in 

 Parliament, and whether he got in through Westminster or Westbury, 

 through Newark or Nova-Scotia, was to him quite the same ; and 

 whether the candidate were ]Mr. Serjeant Wilde or Mr. Jonathan 

 Wild, was, to the im.partiality of the Newarkites, quite the same. Now, 

 are we to be surprised that a parcel of tinkers and tailors, headed by 

 a malster and a retired inn-keeper, should be prevented from putting 

 the town of Newark into the hands of j\lr. Serjeant Wilde, or that their 

 landlord, a man proverbially kind and generous to his tenantry, should 



