queen Caroline and the minister as little as they did. Yet, when Swift died, he left behind him a character of Mrs. Howard by no means flattering, which was published in his posthumous works. On its appearance, Mrs. Howard (become lady Suffolk) said to me in her calm, dispassionate manner, "All I can say is, that it is very different from one that he drew of me and sent to me many years ago, and which I have, written by his own hand."

Lord Chesterfield, rather more ingenuous, as his character of her, but under a feigned name, was printed in his life, though in a paper of which he was not known to be the author, was not more consistent. Eudosia, described in the weekly journal called Common Sense, for September 10, 1737, was meant for lady Suffolk-yet was it no fault of hers that he was proscribed at court; nor did she perhaps ever know, as he never did till the year before his death, when I acquainted him with it by his friend sir John Irwin, why he had been put into the queen's Index expurgatorius. The queen had an obscure window at St. James's that looked into a dark passage, lighted only by a single lamp at night, which looked upon Mrs. Howard's apartment. Lord Chesterfield, one twelfth-night, at court, had won so large a sum of money, that he thought it imprudent to carry it home in the dark, and deposited it with the mistress. Thence the queen inferred great intimacy; and thenceforwards lord Chesterfield could obtain no favour from court; and, finding himself desperate, went into opposition. My father himself long afterwards told me the story, and had become the principal object of the peer's satiric wit, though he had not been the

mover of his disgrace. The weight of that anger fell more disgracefully on the king, as I shall mention in the next chapter.

I will here interrupt the detail of what I have heard of the commencement of that reign, and farther anecdotes of the queen and the mistress, till I have related the second very memorable transaction of that æra; and which would come in awkwardly, if postponed till I have dispatched many subsequent particulars.

CHAPTER VI.

Ar the first council held by the new sovereign, Dr. Wake, archbishop of Canterbury, produced the will of the late king, and delivered it to the successor, expecting it would be opened and read in council. On the contrary, his majesty put it into his pocket, and stalked out of the room, without uttering a word on the subject. The poor prelate was thunderstruck, and had not the presence of mind or the courage to demand the testament's being opened, or at least to have it registered. No man present chose to be more hardy than the person to whom the deposit had been trusted-perhaps none of them immediately conceived the possible violation of so solemn an act so notoriously existent. Still, as the king never mentioned the will more, whispers only by degrees informed the public, that the will was burnt, at least that its injunctions were never fulfilled.

What the contents were was never ascertained.

Report said, that forty thousand pounds had been bequeathed to the duchess of Kendal; and more vague rumours spoke of a large legacy to the queen of Prussia, daughter of the late king. Of that bequest demands were afterwards said to have been frequently and roughly made by her son the great king of Prussia, between whom and his uncle subsisted much inveteracy.

The legacy to the duchess was some time after on the brink of coming to open and legal discussion. Lord Chesterfield marrying her niece and heiress, the countess of Walsingham, and resenting his own proscription at court, was believed to have instituted, or at least to have threatened, a suit for recovery of the legacy to the duchess, to which he was then become entitled: and it was as confidently believed that he was quieted by the payment of twenty thousand pounds.

But if the archbishop had too timidly betrayed the trust reposed in him from weakness and want of spirit, there were two other men who had no such plea of imbecility, and who, being independent and above being awed, basely sacrificed their honour and integrity for positive sordid gain. George the first had deposited duplicates of his will with two sovereign German princes-1 will not specify them, because at this distance of time I do not perfectly recollect their titles; but I was actually some years ago shown a copy of a letter from one of our ambassadors abroad to a secretary of state at that period, in which the ambassador said, one of the princes in question would accept the proffered subsidy, and had delivered, or would deliver, the duplicate of the king's will. The other trustee was

no doubt as little conscientious and as corrupt.-It is pity the late king of Prussia did not learn their infamous treachery!

Discoursing once with lady Suffolk on that suppressed testament, she made the only plausible shadow of an excuse that could be made for George the second-She told me, that George the first had burnt two wills made in favour of his son. They were probably the wills of the duke and duchess of Zell; or one of them might be that of his mother, the princess Sophia.

The crime of the first George could only palliate, not justify, the criminality of the second; for the second did not punish the guilty, but the innocent. But bad precedents are always dangerous, and too likely to be copied.

CHAPTER VII.

I WILL now resume the story of lady Suffolk, whose history, though she had none of that influence on the transactions of the cabinet that was expected, will still probably be more entertaining to two young ladies, than a magisterial detail of political. events, the traces of which at least may be found in journals and brief chronicles of the times. The interior of courts, and the lesser features of history, are precisely those with which we are least acquainted, I mean of the age preceding our own. Such anecdotes are forgotten in the multiplicity of those that ensue, or reside only in the memory of idle old persons, or have not yet emerged into

publicity from the porte-feuilles of such garrulous Brantômes as myself. Trifling I will not call myself; for, while 1 have such charming disciples as you two to inform; and though acute or plodding politicians, for whom they are not meant, may condemn these pages; which is preferable, the labour of an historian who toils for fame and for applause from he knows not whom; or my careless commission to paper of perhaps insignificant passages that I remember, but penned for the amusement of a pair of such sensible and cultivated minds as I never met at so early an age, and whose fine eyes I do know will read me with candour, and allow me that mite of fame to which I aspire, their approbation of my endeavours to divert their evenings in the country? O Guicciardin! is posthumous renown so valuable as the satisfaction of reading these court-tales to the lovely B-ys?

Henrietta Hobart was daughter of sir Henry, and sister of sir John Hobart, knight of the bath on the revival of the order, and afterwards by her interest made a baron; and since created earl of Buckinghamshire.

She was first married to Mr. Howard, the younger brother of more than one earl of Suffolk; to which title he at last succeeded himself, and left a son by her, who was the last earl of that branch. She had but the slender fortune of an ancient baronet's daughter; and Mr. Howard's circumstances were the reverse of opulent. It was the close of queen Anne's reign: the young couple saw no step more prudent than to resort to Hanover, and endeavour to ingratiate themselves with the future sovereigns of England. Still so narrow was their fortune, that