As Sacheverell left St Paul's and travelled through the City, he was cheered by a crowd. The joke doing the rounds was that "St Paul's was on fire a Saturday". Sacheverell prepared the sermon for publication and consulted three lawyers, who all claimed it breached neither common or civil law. On 25 November the sermon was printed, the first edition being 500 copies. On 1 December the second edition came off the press and numbered between 30,000 and 40,000 copies. By the end of Sacheverell's trial, an estimated 100,000 copies of his sermon were in circulation. A conservative estimate of the readership, 250,000 people, was equal to the whole electorate of Britain at that time. This had no parallel in early eighteenth century Britain.