Note 4 — CAVALIER SONGS AND BALLADS.

The Excise, first introduced by the Long Parliament, was particularly obnoxious to the Tory party. Dr Johnson more than a hundred years later shared all the antipathy of his party to it, and in his Dictionary defined it to be “a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.”