When his Royal Highness George, Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV., freed himself from parental control, and, an ill-disciplined lad, launched himself upon the town, it is well known that he was intimate with Charles James Fox, whom probably he admired more because the King hated the statesman than for any other reason. Doubtless the Prince drank with Fox, and diced with him, and played cards with him, but from his later career it is obvious he can never have touched Fox on that great man’s

The laurels won in early youth he retained all the days of his life. Expense was no object to him, and, indeed, it must be confessed he spent money in many worse ways than on his clothes. Batchelor, his valet, who entered his service after the death of the Duke of York, said that a plain coat, from its repeated alterations and the consequent journeys from London to Windsor to Davison the tailor, would often cost three hundred pounds before it met with his approbation! George had a mania for hoar

He studied medicine in London until 1764, when he went as assistant to his uncle, John Wolcot of Fowey, taking a Scotch Degree of Doctor of Medicine three years later, immediately after which, his distant connection, Sir William Trelawny, going to Jamaica as Governor, he accompanied him as physician. In that island he saw little or no prospect of securing a paying practice, and paid a flying visit to England in 1769 to take holy orders. On his return to Jamaica he found that the lucrative living

“I was never half so much rejoiced at going to any ball in my life as when we first saw the land,” (she wrote to her cousin in England, Elizabeth Sclater, 13th March 1758). “The Dutch people are white, but their servants are all black, they wear nothing at all about them but a little piece of rag about their waist which to us at first appeared very shocking.” “My Papa’s house is the best in Bombay, and where a great deal of company comes every day after dinner.” Among the company that came to Ma

The threads of the college friendship, it has generally been stated, were gathered together when Skelton Castle came into the possession of Hall-Stevenson, who thenceforth resided there. As to when this happened the writers on Sterne only agree in remarking that it was not until after 1745, in which year, after the rebellion, Lawson Trotter, the owner of the castle and a noted Jacobite, fled the country; some say that then the property passed to his sister, Hall-Stevenson’s mother, and at her de

The fact is that the majority of writers on Beckford have been willing to recount what they have heard, without making any attempt at verification, even when such a task would not have been difficult. Beckford, we are told, was as likely to thrash a beggar in the streets as to give him alms. This is really the most truthful of all the charges brought against him, for it actually has for its foundation the fact that he once did strike a beggar! Here is the story: When Beckford was riding one day

“Fox drinks what I should call a great deal, though he is not reckoned to do so by his companions; Sheridan, excessively, and Grey more than any of them; while Pitt, I am told, drinks as much as anybody, generally more than any of his company, and is a pleasant, convivial man at table,” Sir Gilbert Elliot has recorded; and Lord Bulkeley wrote to the Marquis of Buckingham à propos of Pitt bringing in the Declaratory Bill of the powers of the Board of Control: “It was an awkward day for him (owing

Lord Wharton—for his services to William III. created in 1706 earl, when his heir became known as Viscount Winchendon—was not only a pleasure-loving man, but also a strenuous politician. He, imbued with the idea that his boy, in his turn, might add further laurels to the family name, with this object in view kept a more than paternal eye upon the direction of the youngster’s studies. To his parents’ great joy, Philip gave signs of precocious cleverness, and it was decided to have him educated by