"The mimic Nymph that haunts the winding Verge
And oozy current of Parisian Seine"
to weep for Frederick.
"For well was Fred'rick loved and well deserv'd,
His voice was ever sweet, and on his lips
Attended ever the alluring grace
Of gentle lowliness and social zeal."
The hind who labored was to weep for him, and the artificer to ply his varied woof in sullen sadness, and the mariner,
"Who many moons
Has counted, beating still the foamy Surge,
And treads at last the wish'd-for beach, shall stand
Appall'd at the sad tale."
Here all the learned languages, and not the learned languages alone, contributed their syllables of simulated despair. Many scholastic gentlemen mourned in Greek; James Stillingfleet found vent in Hebrew; Mr. Betts concealed his tears under the cloak of the Syriac speech; George Costard sorrowed in Arabic that might have amazed Abu l'Atahiyeh; Mr. Swinton's learned sock stirred him to Phoenician and Etruscan; and Mr. Evans, full of national fire and the traditions of the bards, delivered himself, and at great length too, in Welsh. The wail of this "Welsh fairy" is the fine flower of this funeral wreath of pedantic and unconscious irony.
Poor Frederick had played a little with literature in his idle time. He had amused himself with letters as he had amused himself with literary men, and sometimes with rallying a bevy of the maids of honor to the bombardment of a pasteboard citadel and a cannonade of sugar-plums. {278} He had written verses; among the rest, a love tribute to his wife, full of rapture and enriched with the most outspoken description of her various charms of person, which, however, he assures us, were nothing to her charms of mind. Probably he was very fond of his wife; we have already said that it is likely he carried on his amours with other women chiefly because he thought it one of the duties of his princely station. Perhaps we may assume that he must have had some good qualities of his own; he certainly got little teaching or example of goodness from most of those who surrounded him in the days when he could yet have been taught.
The new heir to the throne was George, Frederick's eldest son, who was born in London on June 4, 1738, and was now, therefore, in his thirteenth year. Frederick's wife had already given birth to eight children, and was expected very soon to bring forth another. George was a seven-months' child. His health was so miserably delicate that it was believed he could not live. It was doubted at first whether it would be physically possible to rear him; and it would not have been possible if the ordinary Court customs were to be followed. But the infant George was wisely handed over to the charge of a robust and healthy young peasant woman, a gardener's wife, who took fondest care of him and adored him, and by whose early nursing he lived to be George the Third.
[Sidenote: 1753—The last of Bolingbroke]
The year 1751, which may be said to have opened with the death of poor Frederick, closed with the death of a man greater by far than any prince of the House of Hanover. On December 12th Bolingbroke passed away. He had settled himself quietly down in his old home at Battersea, and there he died. He had outlived his closest friends and his keenest enemies. The wife—the second wife—to whom, with all his faults, he had been much devoted—was long dead. Pope and Gay, and Arbuthnot, and "Matt" Prior and Swift were dead. Walpole, his great opponent, was dead. All chance of a return to public life had faded years before. New conditions and {279} new men had arisen. He was old—was in his seventy-fourth year; there was not much left to him to live for. There had been a good deal of the spirit of the classic philosopher about him—the school of Epictetus, not the school of Aristotle or Plato. He was a Georgian Epictetus with a dash of Gallicized grace about him. He made the most out of everything as it came, and probably got some comfort out of disappointment as well as out of success. Life had been for him one long dramatic performance, and he played it out consistently to the end. He had long believed himself a formidable enemy to Christianity—at least to revealed religion. He made arrangements by his will for the publication, among other writings, of certain essays which were designed to give Christianity its death-blow, and, having satisfactorily settled that business and disposed in advance of the faith of coming ages, he turned his face to the wall and died.