Note xxii — THE ART of POLITICKS, In Imitation of HORACE's ART of POETRY.

lines 11-12. The "one cause" is presumably Walpole's patronage. The Cornish constituencies were notoriously corrupt even by eighteenth-century standards, and Walpole cultivated the Scots assiduously. A Scottish "laird" is a landowner, not a "lord" in the English sense.