I had been trusted with his education now for two years, and he had made amazing progress. I had read over the Psalms, Proverbs, and Gospels with him, and had explained things that fell in my way very copiously; and was often surprised with the questions that he put to me, and the reflections that he made. He came to understand things relating to religion beyond imagination. I went through geography so often with him that he knew all the maps very particularly. I explained to him the forms of government in every country, with the interests and trades of that country, and what was both bad and good in it. I acquainted him with all the great revolutions that had been in the world, and gave him a copious account of the Greek and Roman histories of Plutarch’s lives; the last thing I explained to him was the Gothic constitution and the beneficiary and feudal laws: I talked of these things at different times more than three hours a day; this was both easy and delighting to him. The king ordered five of his chief ministers to come once a quarter and examine the progress he made; they seemed amazed both at his knowledge and the good understanding that appeared in him; he had a wonderful memory and a very good judgment. Poor little Gloucester! The genial bishop breaking down all this knowledge into pleasant talks so that it should be “both easy and delighting,” and his lessons in fortification, which were more delightful still, and his own little private princelike observation of men’s faces and minds, were all to come to naught. On his eleventh birthday, amid the feastings and joy, a sudden illness seized him, and, a few days after, the promising boy had ended his bright little career. As a matter of course, blame was attached to the doctor who attended him, and who had bled him in the beginning of a fever; but this was almost universally the case in the then state of medical science. “He was the only remaining child,” the bishop says, “of seventeen the princess had borne, some to the full time and the rest before it. She attended on him during his sickness with great tenderness, but with a grave composedness that amazed all who saw it. She bore his death with a resignation and piety that were indeed very singular.” It would be small wonder indeed if Anne had been altogether crushed by such a calamity. It is said by some historians of the Jacobite party that her mind was overwhelmed by a sense of her guilt toward her own father, and of just judgment executed upon her in the loss of her child, and that she immediately wrote to James, pouring out her whole heart in penitence, and pledging herself to support the claims of her brother should she ever come to the throne. This letter, however, was never found, and does not seem to be vouched for by witnesses beyond suspicion. But for the fact that Anne was stricken to the dust, no parent will need any