ossession of Dresden. The king and his minister took to flight. This
was the extinction of Bruhl's power. On his return to Dresden, after
peace had been procured, he lost his protector, the king. The new
elector dismissed him from his offices. He died in 1764.

Some scattered anecdotes of Doddington are characteristic of the man and
of the time. Soon after the arrival of Frederick Prince of Wales in
England, Doddington set up for a favourite, and carried the distinction
to the pitifulness of submitting to all the caprices of his royal
highness; among other instances, submitting to the practical joke of
being rolled up in a blanket, and trundled down stairs.

Doddington has been already spoken of as a wit; and even Walpole,
fastidious as he was, gives some instances of that readiness which
delights the loungers of high life. Lord Sunderland, a fellow
commissioner of the treasury, was a very dull man. One day as they left
the board, Sunderland laughed heartily about something which Doddington
had said, and, when gone, Winnington observed, "Doddington, you are very
ungrateful. You call Sunderland stupid and slow, and yet you see how
quickly he took what you said." "Oh no," was the reply, "he was only now
laughing at what I said last treasury day."

Trenchard, a neighbour, telling him, that though his pinery was
extensive, he contrived, by applying the fire and the tan to other
purposes, to make it so advantageous that he believed he got a shilling
by every pine-apple he ate. "Sir," said Doddington, "I would eat them
for half the money." Those are but the easy pleasantries of a man of
conversation. The following is better: Doddington had a habit of falling
asleep after dinner. One day, dining with Sir Richard Temple, Lord
Cobham, &c., he was reproached with his drowsiness. He denied having
been asleep, and to prove his assertion, offered to repeat all that
Cobham had been saying. He was challenged to do so. In reply, he
repeated a story; and Cobham acknowledged that he had been telling it.
"Well," said Doddington, "and yet I did not hear a word of it. But I
went to sleep because I knew that, about this time of day, you would
tell that story."

There are few things more singular than the want of taste, amounting to
the ludicrous, which is sometimes visible in the mansions of public men,
who have great opulence at their disposal. Walpole himself, when he
became rich, was an instance of this bad taste in the laborious
friv