Colley Cibber, that good-humoured and honest veteran, so unworthily aspersed by Pope, and whose Memoirs, with one or two of his comedies, will secure his fame, in spite of all the abuse of his contemporaries, dying about this time at a very great age, the Duke of Devonshire bestowed the laurel on Mr. Whitehead, a man of a placid genius. His Grace had first designed it for Gray,[14] then for Mason, but was told that both would decline it. In truth, it was not Cibber’s silly odes that disgraced the employment, but an annual panegyric venally extorted for whatever King, and with or without occasion, that debased the office. Gray, crowned with the noblest wreaths of Parnassus, could not stoop to be dubbed poet by a Lord Chamberlain; and Mason, though he had not then displayed all the powers of his genius, had too much sense and spirit to owe his literary fame to anything but his own merit. On the 28th of December died the King’s third daughter, Princess Caroline. She had been the favourite of the Queen, who preferred her understanding to those of all her other daughters, and whose partiality she returned with duty, gratitude, affection, and concern. Being in ill health at the time of her mother’s death, the Queen told her she would follow her in less than a year. The Princess received the notice as a prophecy; and though she lived many years after it had proved a vain one, she quitted the world, and persevered in the closest retreat, and in constant and religious preparation for the grave; a moment she so eagerly desired, that when something was once proposed to her, to which she was averse, she said, “I would not do it to die!” To this impression of melancholy had contributed the loss of Lord Hervey,[15] for whom she had conceived an unalterable passion, constantly marked afterwards by all kind and generous offices to his children. For many years she was totally an invalid, and shut herself up in two chambers in the inner part of St. James’s, from whence she could not see a single object. In this monastic retirement, with no company but of the King, the Duke, Princess Emily, and a few of the most intimate of the Court, she led, not an unblameable life only, but a meritorious one: her whole income was dispensed between generosity and charity; and, till her death by shutting up the current discovered the source, the jails of London did not suspect that the best support of their wretched inhabitants was issued from the Palace. From the last Sunday to the Wednesday on which she died, she declined seeing her family; and when the mortification began, and the pain ceased, she said, “I feared I should not have died of this!” Finished August 8th, 1759. FOOTNOTES: