‘Well,’ said Apollo, ‘still ’tis mine, To give the real laurel, For that, my Pope, my son Divine, Of rivals end the quarrel. But, guessing who should have the luck To be the Birth-day fibber, I thought of Dennis, Tibbald, Duck, But never dreamed of Cibber.’ The year was one fruitful in plays; but it was observed that when nuts are plentiful, they are generally of poor quality; so it was with the plays of 1730. They are all clean forgotten, including ‘Sophonisba’ itself,――the epilogue to which tragedy had this advice to ladies who patronised foreign productions:―― To foreign looms no longer owe your charms, Nor make their trade more fatal than their arms, Each British dame who courts her country’s praise, By quitting these outlandish modes, might raise (Not from yon powder’d band, so thin, so spruce) Ten able-bodied men, for public use. [Sidenote: _JACOBITE HEARNE._] There was much meanness in the ill feeling of the Jacobites at even the little mischances that happened to the royal family. On a dark evening in November, the king and queen were returning from Kew to St. James’s, their footmen and grooms carrying torches. A storm of wind blew out the torches, and at Parson’s Green the carriage and its royal freight was overturned. Lord Peterborough’s people came to the rescue, with flambeaux, and the royal pair went on to town with nothing worse than an assortment of bruises. Such accidents were kindly attributed to the drunkenness of servants, but that bitter Jacobite Hearne thought that the mistress, if not the master, could be as drunk as they. Here is a sample of both thought and expression.――‘The present Duchess of Brunswick, commonly called Queen Caroline,’ says Hearne, in his ‘Reliquiæ,’ ‘is a very proud woman, and pretends to great subtlety and cunning. She drinks so hard that her spirits are continually inflamed, and she is often drunk. The last summer, she went away from Orkney House, near Maidenhead (at which she had dined), so drunk that she was sick in the coach all her journey, as she went along;――a thing much noted.’ [Sidenote: _A JACOBITE THREAT._]