The young Prince of Wales's amusements had been few. He was sometimes permitted to play a round card game, called Comet, with his mother and brothers and sisters; and the Princess Dowager showed more liberality of mind than was usual with her by declaring that "she liked the Prince should now and then amuse himself at small play, but that princes should never play deep, both for the example and because it did not become them to win great sums."[88] A greater delight of the Prince was to take part in amateur theatricals, an indulgence sometimes granted as the practice might accustom him to the public speaking that must later fall to his lot. This was of great value to him for, while in conversation his utterance was rapid, on public occasions he spoke so distinctly and with such dignity that Quin, hearing his first Speech from the throne, exclaimed delightedly: "Ay! 'twas I that taught the boy to speak!" But George was not fond of delivering or listening to orations. "I am sure that the rage for public speaking, and the extravagant length to which some of our more popular orators carry their harangues in Parliament, is very detrimental to the national business," he expressed his opinion after he ascended the throne, "and I wish that it may not, in the end, prove injurious to the public peace."[89] [88] Bubb Dodington: _Diary_. [89] Galt: _George III, his Court and Family_. In spite of these occasional relaxations, the family circle at Leicester House was far from bright, and Dodington has recorded how in November, 1753, he was summoned to wait upon the Princess Dowager, and how, instead of the small party and a little music he expected, he found no one but her Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, Prince Edward and Princess Augusta, all in undress. They sat round the fire, and Dodington and the Princess talked of familiar occurrences "with the ease and unreservedness and unconstraint, as if one had dropped into a sister's house that had a family, to pass the evening," but agreeable as it was to Dodington, he could not refrain from wishing, "that the Princess conversed familiarly with more people of a certain knowledge of the world."[90] But even Dodington seldom saw the Prince of Wales, and, though George II showed no disposition to keep his successor in the background, the latter spent much of his time in, perhaps not entirely voluntary, retirement at Kew, where his mother was making "a collection of exotic plants, the precursor of the present Royal Botanical Gardens, on a scale of liberal munificence, besides continuing to erect, under the superintendence of Sir William Chambers, the various ornamental gardens, originally planned by the deceased Prince."[91] Horticulture had little charm for the Prince of Wales, who was, however, attracted by agricultural science, and took an active interest in the farming of his land, tastes which subsequently he endeavoured in vain to inculcate in