Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/225

JOURNALIST AND PRINTER. 213 what is more observable, Friday last, being the tenth of June [the Pretender's birthday], the streets in many places were strewn so again, and the bells of the city rang again. The ' Norwich Gazette ' for these years does not, I think, exist, so that the atual words with which Cross-Grove attacked his Whig opponents are not known. But in any case he irritated them to such an extent that a few days later he writes to tell Strype that they had prosecuted him for sedition : I have sent you one or two of my Gazettes, as you desired, in which you will find I have twice inserted your advertisement. I have also sent you one or two old ones, which cost me some pounds by way of prosecution for them. I was just taken into custody as I received yours ; some villians (sic) having made information that I would head up a body of 80 stout fellows with horns on their heads, on the first of August next, and attack the Whiggish Artillery Company, take their arms from them and down with the Conventicles, and that I did also curse the King. All which I can prove to be false by substantial witnesses. The evidences against me are two pretty fellows ; one, a vagabond who has been convicted of felony, and publicly whipped for it ; and the other a meer ideot. We are here in an irrepressible heat and Informers swarm everywhere. Strype, in reply, seems to have remonstrated with him for being indiscreet, for, on I5th August, 1715, Cross-Grove tells him: 1 am an utter enemy to changes and have found, by History and Experience both, that poor England has