skittles, as Duke Sheffield or Sir John Suckling might have done. The old parishioners had probably seen the comfortable old boys at skittles together, and could not well understand how the silk mercer could have set up so fine a rival establishment in the neighbourhood of the lord of the manor, without some such piece of good luck.

Viscount Campden's heiress, his only child, took her father's titles into the family of the Noels of Rutland, who became Earls of Gainsborough, an honour now extinct. In 1645, during the Commonwealth, the third Viscount was obliged to compound for Campden House with the Commissioners of Sequestration, who for a time ousted his lordship, and took the house for their official residence. At the restoration, Charles the Second went one night to sup with him.

The Viscount's father-in-law, the third Earl of Lindsay, famous for offering to sacrifice himself for the salvation of Charles the First, and for having, when young, surrendered himself prisoner at the battle of Edgehill, in order to be able to attend on his captured father, died in Campden House; a circumstance which, whatever may be thought of his politics, gives a consecration to the place for its association with so loving and noble a spirit. Thirty years afterwards the house was let to Princess, subsequently Queen Anne, who, for the accommodation of her household, made a considerable addition to it on the western side, which is now let apart from the other, and called Little Campden House. The Princess had been residing at Craven Hill, in the house of the old lord of that name, for the benefit of the health of her son, the infant Duke of Gloucester,

THE LITTLE DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 59

whom she now brought here; and here she and her husband, George of Denmark, divided their time with their other mansions in anxious pursuit of that object, the Duke being the only child that was left them out of a numerous family, and presumptive heir to the crown.

The history of this poor little personage is painfully curious. There is a common saying, "As happy as a prince;" and if ever prince was thought happy by those who were not in the secret of courts, this premature victim of his birth and breeding was probably held to be supremely so, especially by all the little boys of England. He was heir to a throne; he lived apart from its troubles in the house of his father and mother; and, what must have appeared a stupendous felicity in the eyes of the little boys, he not only possessed a real, right-earnest, steel sword,

instead of one made of lath and paint, and besides that, a suit of real soldiers' clothesabsolute right earnest regimentals, all red and gold-but, amazing to think! he was colonel of a positive regiment of boys, all dressed in soldier's clothes too. He rode at the head of them; he sat opposite them during parade on a live horse, his own pony; could order them about, and cry March! and look grand and manly; and all the while music would play— real proper fifes, and drums, and trumpets, not at all "penny;" and he had cannon too, and castles, and a wooden horse to put his soldiers on, when they did wrong; and they stood sentinels at his door-ways, and were the terror of the neighbouring cake-shops and apple-stalls, like any proper full-grown gentlemen soldiers. They even had field-days on Wormwood Scrubs, and reviews in Kensington Gardens, and King William was

there to see.

In short, Campden House was

Little Boy's Paradise.

Alas! the god of this paradise was a sickly, big-headed child, the victim of his very birth and breeding, and doomed to an early death. He was the only survivor of seventeen children, not one of whom ought to have been born; for Anne had destroyed her person and constitution by gross livinga propensity derived from her mother, Anne Hyde, perhaps from her grandfather Clarendon; and as the most important of all physiologies was not studied in those days, nobody seems to have suspected (indeed few people still suspect) what disastrous liabilities are entailed upon offspring by habits of this or of any other injurious kind, in parents. The poor little prince was afflicted with water on the brain. He had a head large enough for a grown person, with all the