But other, and even more painful, considerations than those which affected him personally, now pressed upon his attention. The intelligence that a gallant, but not very discreet, officer was actually in arms in a desperate cause, and the rumour that an unfortunate prince, who, up to this time, had been suffering solely for the errors of his ancestors, had cast himself madly into the difficulties and dangers of an ill-considered insurrection against the existing government, grieved him deeply. By principle or by prejudice, as the reader may think fit to call it, he was attached to the exiled house of Stuart; his ancestors had shed their blood and lost their property in its defence; all the traditions of his family were in favour of its cause; and perhaps no man might have felt more ready to unsheath the sword for its re-establishment on the throne of England, had not many things occurred within the last five-and-twenty years to weaken in him that hereditary attachment which had brought ruin upon his father. His early life had been spent at the little Court of St. Germain, and all that he had witnessed of the mean intrigues of that court, and the shameless ingratitude of its princes towards some of their best and most faithful servants, together with the licentiousness, the weakness, the frivolity, and the baseness of the principal persons who surrounded them, if not of the princes themselves, had produced a feeling of disgust which, although it could not alter his view of the supposed justice of their cause, put an end to everything like zeal in their favour. He felt with Addison's friend, the poet Tickell, in the "Epistle to a Gentleman at Avignon:" "From James and Rome I feel my heart decline, And fear, O Brunswick, 'twill be wholly thine; Yet still his share thy rival will contest, And still the double claim divides my breast; The fate of James with pitying eyes I view, And wish my homage were not Brunswick's due; To James; my _passions_ and my _weakness_ guide, But _reason_ sways me to the victor's side."