for he chose dependants, and those Frenchmen. His own habits were querulous and supercilious; and as the fashions of royalty are quickly adopted by its associates, Frederic's coterie was in a state of perpetual warfare. Voltaire led the battle, and when he had sneered his companions out of all resistance, he fell on the monarch himself. No man in a state of perfect idleness can be satisfied with his life; and the Frenchmen had nothing to do but to quarrel, invent scandals,

and yawn.

Thiebault, one of the chosen dwellers in the paradise of Sans Souci, tells us, that their only occupation from morning till night was conjugating the verb s'ennuyer, through all persons, moods, and tenses. Frederic treated them like monkeys in a cage, came in from the council or the parade to amuse himself for the half-hour with looking at their tricks and their visages; then turned on his heel, left them to the eternal weariness of their prison, and went about the business of the world. The Frenchmen at last slipped, one by one, out of this gilded menagerie; ran off to Paris, the only spot where a Frenchman can live ; and libelled the royal wit and infidel with a pungency and profligacy even superior to his own, until they turned the "Grand Frederic" into a public laugh in every corner of Europe beyond the lash of his drum-majors.

Frederic, Prince of Wales, the grandfather of

his late majesty, had also attempted to collect a familiar and literary society round him. But the attempt was a reluctant one, and it naturally failed. It was Lyttleton's suggestion as a source of popularity; and it humiliated Thomson and Mallet, by making them pensioners on an individual. Authorship, to be worthy of public honour, cannot shrink too sensitively from personal protection. The past age scandalised the natural rank of genius. But a wiser, because a more dignified, feeling now prevails among men of literary name. They appeal only to the public, and honourably disdain to stoop to the degradation of any patronage below that of the people and the throne.

CHAPTER VII.

THE PRINCE'S FRIENDS.

THE prince's table afforded the display of men too independent by both their place in society, and their consciousness of intellectual power, to feel themselves embarrassed by the presence of superior rank. Hare, Jekyll, Fitzpatrick, Erskine, with the great parliamentary leaders, were constant guests, and the round was varied by the introduction of celebrated foreigners, and other persons capable of adding to the interest of the circle.

Hare, "the Hare and many friends," as he was called by the clever Duchess of Gordon, in allusion to Gay's fable, and his own universal favouritism, was then at the head of conversational fame. Like Johnson's objection to Topham Beauclerk; "Sir, a man cannot dine with him and preserve his self-applause; Sir, no man who gives a dinner should so overwhelm his guests;" Hare's chief fault was said to be his superabundant pleasantry; a talent which suffered nothing among his friends or enemies to escape, yet which had the rare goodfortune of being pointed without ceasing to be playful.

Some of the sayings of the circle are still re

membered. But if they are given here in the miscellaneous and accidental order of their transpiring in the chances of society, it is by no means without a sufficient feeling, that the repetition of a bon-mot can seldom give more than a proof of the fading nature of pleasantry. The occasion is all. The promptness of the idea, the circumstances, the company, even the countenance, are essential to its poignancy. The re

vived pleasantry is a portrait drawn from the dust, and the originals of whose features have passed away the amusement of a masquerade, when we have nothing of the masquerade left but the mask and the robe. If actors" come like shadows, so depart; the fame of wits is still more fugitive; until it is scarcely paradoxical to say, that the security of their fame depends on the speed of our consigning all its specimens to oblivion. Selwyn was the wit par excellence of his day, and so paramount, that he turns even Horace Walpole into a worshipper: Walpole, himself a wit, and as full of the keenest venom of the smallest ambition, as any man who ever prostrated himself to a court and libelled it. Yet Selwyn's best sayings are now remarkable for scarcely more than their stiffness, their sulkiness, or their want of decorum. They are stamped with bald, dry antiquity; and are perfectly worthy of the fate which has, a second time in our age, sent the skeleton to the grave.

The merit of Hare's jeux-d'esprit was their readiness and their oddity.-Fox, after the fall of the Coalition, coming to dinner at the Pavilion just as he had returned from London, and apologising for appearing in his dishabille and without powder :

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Oh," said Hare, "make no apology; our great guns are discharged, and now we may all do without powder."

"Pleasant news, this, from America," said he, meeting General Fitzpatrick on the first intelligence of Burgoyne's defeat. The general doubted, and replied, "that he had just come from the secretary of state's office without hear

ing any thing of it." "Perhaps so," said Hare, "but take it from me as a flying rumour."

Fox's negligence of his fortune had induced his friends to find out a wife for him among the great heiresses. Miss Pulteney, afterwards Countess of Bath, was fixed upon; and Fox, though probably without any peculiar inclination. to the match, paid his court for a while. A seat was frequently left for him beside the lady, and he made his attentions rather conspicuous during Hastings's trial. Some one observed to Hare the odd contrast between Fox's singularly dark complexion, and Miss Pulteney's pale face and light hair. "What a strange sort of children they will make," was the observation. Why,

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