The Houses sit, but no business will be done till after the holidays. AnStruther's affair will go on, but not with MUCH spirit. One wants to see faces about again! Dick lyttelton, one of the patriot officers, had collected depositions on oath against the Duke for his behaviour in Scotland, but I suppose he will now throw his papers into Ham/let's grave?
Prince George, who has a most amiable countenance, behaved excessively well on his father's death. When they told him of it, he turned pale, and laid his hand on his breast. Ayscough said, "I am afraid, Sir, you are not well!"-he replied, "I feel something here, just as I did when I saw the two workmen fall from the scaffold at Kew." Prince Edward is a very plain boy, with strange loose eyes, but was much the favourite. He is a sayer of things! Two men were heard lamenting the death in Leicester-fields: one said, "He has left a great many small children!"-"Ay," replied the other, "and what is worse, they belong to our parish!" But the most extraordinary reflections on his death were set forth in a sermon at Mayfair chapel. "He had no great parts, (pray mind, this was the parson said so, not I,) but he had great virtues; indeed, they degenerated into vices - he was very generous, but I hear his generosity has ruined a great many people: and then his condescension was such, that he kept very bad company."
Adieu! my dear child; I have tried, you see, to blend so much public history with our private griefs, as may help to interrupt your too great attention to the calamities in the former part of my letter. You will, with the properest good-nature in the world, break the news to the poor girl, whom I pity, though I never saw. Miss Nicholl is, I am told, extremely to be pitied too; but so is every body that knew Whithed! Bear it yourself as well as you can!
(230) Francis Thistlethwaite, who took the name of Whithed for his uncle's estate and, as heir to him, recovered Mr. Norton's estate, which he had left to the Parliament for the use of the poor, etc,; but the will was set aside for insanity. [See ant`e.)
(231) Vide Gray's Ode on a distant prospect of Eton College.
(232) Walpole, in his Memoires, vol. i. p. 504, says, "The following which is the elegy alluded to, was probably the effusion of some Jacobite royalist. That faction could not, forgive the Duke of Cumberland his excesses or successes in Scotland; and not content with branding the parliamentary government of the country as usurpation, indulged in frequent unfailing and scurrilous personalities on every branch of the reigning family.
"Here lies Fred,
Who was alive and is dead:
Had it been his father,
I had much rather:
Had it been his brother,
Still better than another;
Had it been his sister,
No one would have missed her;
Had it been the whole generation,
Still better for the nation;
But since 'tis only Fred,
Who was alive and is dead-
There is no more to be said."-E.
(233) The Duke of Cumberland, by his friends styled the Hero of culloden, by his opponents nicknamed Billy the Butcher.-E.
99 Letter 39 To Sir Horace Mann. Arlington Street, April 22, 1751.
I could not help, my dear child, being struck with the conclusion of your letter of the 2d of this month, which I have just received; it mentions the gracious assurances you had received from the dead Prince—indeed, I hope you will not want them. The person(234) who conveyed them was so ridiculous as to tell your brother that himself was the most disappointed of all men, he and the Prince having settled his first ministry in such a manner that nothing could have defeated the plan.(235) An admirable scheme for power in England, founded only on two persons! Some people say he was to be a duke and secretary of state. I would have him drawn like Edward V. with the coronet hanging over his head. You will be entertained with a story of Bootle: his washerwoman came to a friend of hers in great perplexity, and said, "I don't know what to do, pray advise me; my master is gone the circuit, and left me particular orders to send him an express if the King died: but here's the Prince, dead and he said nothing about him." You would easily believe this story, if you knew what a mere law-pedant it is!