le at least knew how to distinguish it from good nature. He would
bow to his postilion, while he was ruining his tailor."

The prince's death had all the effect of the last act of a melo-drama.
It had blown up more castles in the air, than any explosion in the
history of paint and pasteboard. All the rejected of the court had
naturally flocked round the heir-apparent, and never was worship of the
rising sun more mortified by its sudden eclipse. Peerages in embryo
never came to the birth, and all sorts of ministerial appointments, from
the premier downwards, which had been looked upon as solid and sure,
were scattered by this one event into thin air. Drax, the prince's
secretary, who "could not write his own name;" Lord Baltimore, who,
"with a great deal of mistaken knowledge, could not spell;" and Sir
William Irby, the princesses' Polonius, were to be barons; Doddington,
it was said, had actually kissed hands for the reversion of a dukedom!

The whole work is a picture gallery. Doddington, whose "Diary" has
placed him among those authors whose happiest fate would have been to
have been prohibited the use of pen, ink, and paper, is sketched to the
life in a few keen and graphic lines.

"This man, with great knowledge of business and much wit, had, by mere
absurdity of judgment and a disposition to finesse, thrown himself out
of all estimation, and out of all the views which his large fortune and
abilities could not have failed to promote, if he had preserved but the
least shadow of steadiness. He had two or three times gone all lengths
of flattery, alternately with Sir Robert Walpole and the prince. The
latter keenly said, 'that they had met again, at last, in a necessary
connexion, for no party would have any thing to do with either.'"

Why has not some biographer, curious in the dissection of human vanity,
written the real life of Doddington? There could be no richer subject
for a pen contemptuous of the follies of high life and capable of
dissecting that compound of worldly passion and infirm principle which,
in nine instances out of ten, figures in the front ranks of mankind.

Doddington had begun public life with higher advantages than most men of
his time. He had figure, fortune, and fashion; he was employed early in
Spain, with Sir Paul Methuen, our ambassador; where he signed the treaty
of Madrid. He then clung to Walpole, whom he panegyrised in verse and
adulated in prose. But Walpole thwarted his longing for