PhilK:
So have I, Don, but it's right there in every biography of Wilkes I've ever read. Besides, the whole tone is wrong for mid-Victorian Britain - but utterly right for the far rougher atmosphere of 18th-century political debate. The Gladstone quote sounds much more like Dizzy.
You may well be right, although some of that tone was definitely still around. But mostly not Dizzy's style, that is true. I know rather less about Wilkes than i do about Dizzy -- a very odd and complex man. Perhaps he quoted the Wilkes episode once -- he would have surely read of it -- and so it became associated with him.
I also love his "When the *honorable* gentleman's ancestors were savages in the forest, mine were priests in Solomon's temple" (from memory so may be inaccurate, but the gist is correct).
From about the same period, but the other side of the ocean:
"They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge." Representative (later Speaker) Thomas B. Reed referring to two of his colleagues in the House of Representatives.