ous 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 dram