That family was established here by surmounting a rebellion; to which settlement perhaps the phrensy of the South Sea scheme contributed, by diverting the national attention from the game of faction to the delirium of stockjobbing; and even faction was split into fractions by the quarrel between the king and the heir apparent-another interlude, which authorizes me to call the reign of George 1. a proem to the history of the reigning House of Brunswick, so successively agitated by parallel feuds.

Commen`cons.

As my first hero was going off the stage before I ought to have come upon it, it will be necessary to tell you why the said two personages happened to meet just two nights before they were to part for ever; a rencounter that barely enables me to give you a general idea of the former’s person and of his mistress’s-or, as has been supposed, his wife’s.

As I was the youngest by eleven years of Sir Robert Walpole’s children by his first wife, and was extremely weak and delicate, as you see me still, though with no constitutional complaint till I had the gout after forty, and as my two sisters were consumptive and died of consumptions, the supposed necessary care of me (and I have overheard persons saying, “That child cannot possibly live”) so engrossed the attention of my mother, that compassion and tenderness soon became extreme fondness; and as the infinite good-nature of my father never thwarted any of his children, he suffered me to be too much indulged, and permitted her to gratify the first vehement inclination that I ever expressed, and which, as I have never since felt any enthusiasm for royal persons, I must suppose that the female attendants in the family must have put into my head, to long to see the king.  This childish caprice was so strong, that my mother solicited the Duchess of Kendal to obtain for me the honour of kissing his Majesty’s hand before he set out for Hanover.  A favour so unusual to be asked for a boy of ten years old, was still too slight to be refused to the wife of the first minister for her darling child; yet not being proper to be made a precedent, it was settled to be in private, and at night.

Accordingly, the night but one before the king began his last journey, my mother carried me at ten at night to the apartment of the Countess of Walsingham, (59) on the ground floor, towards the garden at St. James’s, which opened into that of her aunt, the Duchess of Kendal’s:  apartments occupied by George ii. after his queen’s death, and by his successive mistresses, the Countesses of Suffolk and Yarmouth.

Notice being given that the king was come down to supper, Lady Walsingham took me alone into the duchess’s ante-room, where we found alone the king and her.  I knelt down, and kissed his hand.  He said a few words to me, and my conductress led me back to my mother (60)