The Bishop writes two years later, that he had made "amazing progress." They had read together the Psalms, Proverbs and Gospels, and the bishop had explained things that fell in his way "very copiously, and was often surprised at the questions he put me, and the reflections that he made. He came to understand things relating to religion beyond imagination."[116] Besides religion the good bishop seems to have crammed his pupil's head with a mass of knowledge--geography, forms of government in every country, the interests and trades of every nation, the history "of all the great revolutions that had been in the world;" and he explained "the Gothic constitution and the beneficiary and feudal laws." No wonder that as one historian says, "his tender constitution bended under the weight of his manly soul, and was too much harass'd by the vivacity of his genius, to be of long duration.... In a word, he was too forward to arrive at maturity."[117] On July 24, 1700, the Duke of Gloucester was eleven years old. The next day Bishop Burnet tells that he complained a little: but every one thought he was tired with his birthday festivities. The day after he grew rapidly worse. A malignant fever declared itself, and he "died on the fourth day of his illness, to the great grief of all who were concerned with him." He was buried quite quietly, in the same vault as his great-uncle Henry, Duke of Gloucester, beside their common ancestress, Mary, Queen of Scots. The death of this little boy was an event of enormous importance to England. The Stuart line was at an end, and the eyes of England now turned to George Lewis, the Elector of Hanover, grandson of that unfortunate Queen of Bohemia, who we know best as Princess Elizabeth, the favorite sister and playfellow of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. And with the death of "the last hope of the race--thus withered, as it must have seemed, by the doom of Providence"[118]--our history of the children of Westminster draws to a close. Besides those whose lives and stories we have studied together, there are several of whom little is known but the facts of their death and burial in our stately Abbey. The year before little William, Duke of Gloucester, was born, two "holy innocents" were laid to rest at Westminster; one, Nicholas Bagnall, an "infant of two months old, by his nurse unfortunately overlaid," is commemorated by a white marble urn in the Chapel of St. Nicholas, among the Percys and the Cecils. And in the Cloisters there is a touchingly simple tablet which Dean Stanley delighted to point out to every one, bearing these words: "Jane Lister, dear child, died October 7, 1688." [Illustration: A WESTMINSTER BOY.]