Poetasters converted Horace’s laudation of Augustus into flattery of Cumberland. Fables were written in which sweet William served at once for subject and for moral. Epigrams from Martial, or from a worse source――the writers’ own brains――were fresh but bluntly pointed in his favour. Some of them compared him to the sun, at whose warmth ‘vermin cast off their coats and took wing.’ Others raised him far above great Julius; for Cumberland ‘conquers, coming; and before he sees.’ Sappho, under the name of _Clarinda_, told the world, on hearing a report of the duke’s illness, that if Heaven took him, it would be the death of her, and that the world would lose a Hero and a Maid together. Heroic writers, trying Homer’s strain, and not finding themselves equal to it, blamed poor Homer, and declared that the strings of his lyre were too weak to bear the strain of the modern warrior’s praise. Occasional prologues hailed him as ‘the martial boy,’ on the day he entered his twenty-sixth year. Pinchbeck struck a medal in his honour; punsters in coffee-houses rang the changes on _metal_ and _mettle_, and Pinchbeck became almost as famous for the medal as he subsequently became for his invention of new candle-snuffers, when the poets besought him to ‘snuff the candle of the state, which burned a little blue.’ In fine, ballads, essays, apologues, prose and poetry, were exhausted in furnishing homage to the hero. The homage culminated when the duke’s portrait appeared in all the shops, bearing the inscription, ‘ECCE HOMO!’ [Illustration: Flowers] [Illustration: Decorative banner] CHAPTER VIII. (1746.)