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 it is only Fred,
Who was alive and is dead,
There's no more to be said."

It is curious to contrast this grim suggestion for an epitaph on the
dead prince with the stately volume which the University of Oxford
issued from the Clarendon Press: "Epicedia Oxoniensia in obitum
celsissimi et desideratissimi Frederici Principis Walliae." Here an
{277} obsequious vice-chancellor displayed all the splendors of a
tinsel Latinity in the affectation of offering a despairing king and
father such consolations for his loss as the Oxonian Muses might offer.
Here Lord Viscount Stormont, in desperate imitation of Milton, did his
best to teach

"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 vari