was

"But why did not Langdale defend his property?" was the question. "He had not the means, the answer. "Not the means of defence?" said the prince; "ask Angelo: he, a brewer, a fellow all his life long at cart and tierce."

The prince's regiment were expecting orders for Ireland. St. Leger said that garrison duty in Dublin was irksome, and that country quarters were so squalid, that they would destroy the lace and uniforms of the regiment, which even then were remarkably rich. Well, then," said the prince, "let them do their duty as dragoons, and scour the country."

A heavy-heeled cavalry officer, at one of the Brighton balls, astounded the room by the peculiar impressiveness of his dancing. A circle of affrighted ladies fluttered over to the prince, and inquired, by what possibility they could escape being trampled out of the world by this formidable performer. Nothing can be done," said the prince, "since the war is over: then, he might have been sent back to America, as a republication of the stamp act.”

Horne Tooke was committed to prison on a charge of treason, which he bore so loftily, that he was said to have an intention of establishing regular club dinners in the jail.

having been the most attractive and accomplished man whom he ever met, in the range of a life spent in the best society of Europe; as the most open-hearted and even-tempered of human beings, during the entire period of their intercourse; as possessing a remarkable degree of knowledge, peculiarly on military subjects; and, on the whole, as gifted with acquirements and abilities which, if the field for their exertion had not been so sternly closed at the commencement of his public life, must have placed the Prince of Wales among the most popular and eminent individuals who ever inherited the British throne.

The charges of caprice, and of those sudden checks of familiarity which have been subsequently laid against him, if they were not founded more in the foolish presumption of those who made them, than of him who might have had no other means of repulsing unworthy society, seem to have had no existence at this period. The table was free and equal; the prince enjoyed his witticism, and bore its reply; and perhaps at no table in England was there more case, liveliness, or freedom from the royal frown that looks down subjects into silence.

On the king's opening the session of parliament, the prince had gone in state in a military uniform with diamond epaulettes. At dinner Doyle came in late, and, to the prince's inquiry

whether he had seen the procession? answered, that he had been among the mob, "who prodigiously admired his royal highness's equipage." "And did they say nothing else?" asked the prince, who was at this time a good deal talked of, from his encumbrances.

"Yes. One fellow, looking at your epaulette, said, 'Tom, what an amazing fine thing the prince has got on his shoulders!' Ay,' answered the other, 'fine enough, and fine as it is it will soon be on our shoulders." The prince paused a moment, then looked Doyle in the face, and laughing, said, "Ah! I know where that hit came from, you rogue; that could be nobody's but yours. Come, take some wine."

Curran, the celebrated Irish barrister, was a frequent guest at the Pavilion, and all his recollections of it were panegyrical. He said, and this at a time when his intercourse with courts, and nearly with life, was at an end; that, considered as a test of colloquial liveliness and wit, he had never met any thing superior to the prince's table, and that the prince himself was among the very first there; that he had never met any man who kept him more on the qui vive; and if his own habits might have given him a little more practice, the prince fairly kept up at saddle-skirts with him."

66

St. Leger, a shewy Irishman, coming to

I

"The parson had better give a masquerade, and appear as Tartuffe," said Sheridan. "No; a concert is the thing," said the prince: Newgate is a capital place for a ketch club."

Sheridan was detailing the failure of Fox's match with Miss Pulteney. "I never thought that any thing would result from it," said the prince. Then," replied Sheridan, "it was not for want of sighs: he sat beside her cooing like a turtle-dove."

"He never cared about it," said the prince; " he saw long ago that it was a coup manqué.”

At a later period, one of the newspapers quoted a speech of Sir Joseph Yorke, who, in his usual good-humoured style, said, at some public dinner in winter, that, for his part, in such society, he knew no difference of politics And that a coal fire, champagne,

or seasons.

and good company, might turn winter into summer at any day of the year.

"Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by the Son of Yorke."

In Cyril Jackson's visits to Brighton, the conversation frequently turned on points of literature. On one occasion, the prince quoted a phrase from

Homer. Jackson doubted, the prince persisted.

66

Well, then," said the old man, with the freedom of former preceptorship, if that be the line, you have got it by heart to puzzle me: you have parroted it." "Let the Homer be brought," said the prince," and now see if I have parroted it. The book was brought, and he repeated half the page from memory. Jackson was delighted. "Ah!" said he, "I knew that you would be a scholar; and it was I who made you one."

Fox disliked Dr. Parr; who, however, whether from personal admiration, or from the habit which through life humiliated his real titles to respect that of fastening on the public favourites of the time, persecuted him with praise. The prince saw a newspaper panegyric on Fox, evidently from the Dr.'s pen; and on being asked what he thought of it, observed, that "It reminded him of the famous epitaph on Machiavel's tomb,

"Tanto nomini nullum Par elogium."

66

If English punning be a proscribed species of wit; though it bears, in fact, much more the character of the " chartered libertine," every where reprobated, and every where received; yet classical puns take rank in all lands and languages. Burke's pun on "the divine right of kings and toastmasters,” — the jure de-vino—per