But if the official fool had gone out, foolish officers still exercised a silly vocation at court. Perhaps the most silly of these was the King’s cock-crower, who was still loud and lusty, at the opening of the Georgian era. This personage crowed at each hour of the night. On the first Ash-Wednesday which occurred after the accession of the Hanoverian family, the Prince of Wales (subsequently George II.) supped at court. Just as ten o’clock struck, his Majesty’s cock-crower, who happened to be behind the Prince, set up such a chanticleering, that the Prince started up in indignation at what he deemed a fool’s insult. The courtiers had some difficulty in assuring him that the crowing and crower formed part of the ordinary court etiquette. The Prince would not tolerate such a nuisance, and another fool’s office was annihilated when he came to the throne. There were still some wits, however, in whom the popular voice hailed an arch-jester. I may notice one, whose very grave is likely soon to be forgotten. In the old cemetery (belonging to St. Clement’s Danes), in Portugal-street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in a grave, the head-stone of which was during many summers, until recently, regularly embowered and concealed by sun-flowers, lie the remains of the witty jester, Joe Miller. There they have been since 1738. The year following, John Mottley, the author of ‘Peter the Great,’ published a collection of jests as honest Joe’s, but they were really a collection of witty things which in his time he had either heard or read, and to which Mottley appended Miller’s name. The latter died at the age of fifty-four, the exact age at which departed so recently from among us, he who held the “consulship of wit,” in England,--Douglas Jerrold. That Miller was “facetious,” we learn from the inscription above his grave; that he was witty also, his jest not merely turning on a pun, but on a chain of ideas, the following will testify. He was once sitting in the parlour of the Sun Tavern, in Clare-street, or the Black Jack, in Portsmouth-street, his favourite houses, when a fishwoman passed by, crying “Buy my soles! buy my maids!”--“Ah, you wicked old creature!” said Joe to her, “are you not contented to sell your own soul, but you must sell your maid’s too?”