recusants who had cut off Charles Stuart’s head for treason, were fain to accept a king whose title came to him through a royal grandmother, whose own royal grandmother’s head had fallen under Queen Bess’s hatchet.  And our proud English nobles sent to a petty German town for a monarch to come and reign in London and our prelates kissed the ugly hands of his Dutch mistresses, and thought it no dishonor.  In England you can but belong to one party or t’other, and you take the house you live in with all its encumbrances, its retainers, its antique discomforts, and ruins even; you patch up, but you never build up anew.  Will we of the new world submit much longer, even nominally, to this ancient British superstition?  There are signs of the times which make me think that ere long we shall care as little about King George here, and peers temporal and peers spiritual, as we do for King Canute or the Druids.

This chapter began about the wits, my grandson may say, and hath wandered very far from their company.  The pleasantest of the wits I knew were the Doctors Garth and Arbuthnot, and Mr. Gay, the author of “Trivia,” the most charming kind soul that ever laughed at a joke or cracked a bottle.  Mr. Prior I saw, and he was the earthen pot swimming with the pots of brass down the stream, and always and justly frightened lest he should break in the voyage.  I met him both at London and Paris, where he was performing piteous congees to the Duke of Shrewsbury, not having courage to support the dignity which his undeniable genius and talent had won him, and writing coaxing letters to Secretary St. John, and thinking about his plate and his place, and what on earth should become of him should his party go out.  The famous Mr. Congreve I saw a dozen of times at Button’s, a splendid wreck of a man, magnificently attired, and though gouty, and almost blind, bearing a brave face against fortune.

The great Mr. Pope (of whose prodigious genius I have no words to express my admiration) was quite a puny lad at this time, appearing seldom in public places.  There were hundreds of men, wits, and pretty fellows frequenting the theatres and coffee-houses of that day—­whom “nunc perscribere longum est.”  Indeed I think the most brilliant of that sort I ever saw was not till fifteen years afterwards, when I paid my last visit in England, and met young Harry Fielding, son of the Fielding that served in Spain and afterwards in Flanders with us, and who for fun and humor seemed to top them all.  As for the famous Dr. Swift, I can say of him, “Vidi tantum.”  He was in London all these years up to the death of the Queen; and in a hundred public places where I saw him, but no more; he never missed Court of a Sunday, where once or twice he was pointed out to your grandfather.  He would have sought me out eagerly enough had I been a great man with a title to my name, or a star on my coat.  At Court the Doctor had no eyes but for the very greatest.  Lord Treasurer and St. John used to call him Jonathan,