When a lad at Grantham Free School, he alone accepted the magisterial proposal to compose a funeral oration, in honour of the dead king, Charles II. He gained such glory by his achievement that his fellows sent him to Coventry. For succeeding better than any of them in writing an ode in honour of the new King, an ode which he modestly owns to have been as execrable as anything he composed half a century later, when poet-laureate, they ostracised the bard whom they could not equal in song. Colley was satisfied with his glory, and treated his young adversaries with all the mingled good-nature and audacity with which he subsequently treated his better armed enemy, Mr. Pope. When he "met the Revolution," in 1688, at Nottingham, failing to obtain military employment, he gladly availed himself of an opportunity to wait behind Lady Churchill's chair, as she sat at table with the Princess Anne. Half a hundred years later he refers to the friend he acquired by thus performing lacquey to her; and he happily caps a climax of glorious compliment to the then Duchess of Marlborough, by flatteringly alluding to something that pleasantly distinguished her above all the women of her time,--a distinction which she received not from earthly sovereigns, but "from the Author of Nature;" that of being "_a great grandmother without grey hairs_." He failed, indeed, in obtaining a commission, as he did in an attempt to enter the Church; but for those failures Cibber was, in no wise, responsible. Had he grasped a pair of colours we should have heard of him, honourably, in Flanders. Had he received ordination, he would at least have as well known how to push his way as the reverend Philip Bisse, who kissed the Countess of Plymouth in the dark, affecting to take her for a maid of honour, and who thereby gained that lively widow for a wife, and through her the bishoprics, successively, of St. Davids and Hereford. Colley being alike debarred from ascending the pulpit, or leading to the imminently deadly breach, turned to the sock and buskin, alternately donning the one or the other, for nothing; but watching his opportunity, and never failing to take advantage of it. He gladly, after a term of hungry probation, accepted the little part of the Chaplain, in the "Orphan;" and when the old comedian Goodman swore there was the stuff for the making of a good actor in the young fellow, the tears came into Cibber's eyes; but they were tears of joy, for he recognised that his good time had commenced, and he watched opportunity more indefatigably than ever.