During the married life of Frederick and Augusta, the memoirs of the time give slight and sometimes rather spiteful hints of their doings at Kew, as to which, indeed, Lord Hervey’s caustic pen has no worse to tell than that they walked three or four hours daily in the lanes and fields about Richmond, with a scandal-blown lady-in-waiting and a dancing-master for company. The Prince was much given to private theatricals, but also to athletic games, among them such innocent ones as rounders, tennis, and base-ball, the last not yet banished across the Atlantic. The dog given to him by Pope is remembered by the couplet inscribed on its collar:-- I am His Highness’s dog at Kew, Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you? This poet-neighbour boasted himself not a follower but a friend of His Highness, who did not want for two-legged dogs wagging their tails to him in town and country, on the speculation that his father’s death might any day change the tap of honour and profit. But all such expectations were nipped short. In March 1751 the Prince caught cold at Kew, and had symptoms of pleurisy. Supposed to be out of danger, he went back to Kew, where he walked about like a convalescent; but the same night, after returning to town, showed signs of a fresh chill. Again he seemed to be on the mend, then suddenly one evening was seized with a violent fit of coughing. “_Je sens la mort!_” he exclaimed, and these were his last words. It proved that a tumour had burst, produced either by a fall or by a blow from a tennis ball three years before. “Thus,” says Horace Walpole, “died Frederick, Prince of Wales, having resembled his pattern the Black Prince in nothing but in dying before his father.” He appears to have been not unpopular with the mob, as princes are apt to be who make the money fly; but history has no good to tell of him, unless one kindly act in his intercession for Flora Macdonald. Scholars and divines duly lamented him with overdone effusions in the _Tu Marcellus eris_ vein; but these crocodile tears of the Muses are less well-remembered than that uncourtly epitaph that seems to have better expressed the not even lukewarm loyalty of the first Georgian generation:-- Here lies Fred Who was alive and is dead. Had it been his father, I had much rather. Had it been his brother, Still better than another. Had it been his sister, No one would have missed her. Had it been the whole generation, Still better for the nation. But since ’tis only Fred, Who was alive and is dead, There’s no more to be said.