One of the greatest honours ever rendered to a dramatist by royalty, was conferred by Queen Caroline, wife of George II., on Mottley. The poet was but a poet by courtesy; his two stilted tragedies were soon forgotten, and a better fate has not attended his other productions. What merit gained for him the favour of so great a queen was never known. Mottley's father was an active Jacobite; but the son was a seeker of places, for which he obtained more promises than were realised. Yet for this obscure person, whose benefit night was announced as to take place soon after the Queen's Drawing Room had been held, that queen herself, in that very drawing room (the occasion being the Prince of Wales's birthday), sold Mottley's tickets, delivering them with her own royal hand to the purchasers, and condescending to receive gold for them in return. The money was handed over to that gravest of the Hanoverian officials, Colonel Schurtz, privy-purse to the prince, who presented the same to the highly-honoured, and, perhaps, much astonished poet, with a handsome guerdon added to it by the prince himself. It is due to the audiences at Oxford, where the actors played in their brief season twice a day, that it should be said, that the taste of the University was superior to that of the metropolis. Whatever modern dramatists might assert with respect to Shakspeare, and however the "more politely written comedies" might be acceptable to a licentious London pit, Oxford asserted the superiority of Shakspeare and Ben Jonson, "for whose masterly scenes," says Cibber, "they seemed to have as implicit a reverence as, formerly, for the ethics of Aristotle." The flash, and tinsel, and even the sterling metal mixed up with the dross of the modern illustrative comedy, had no attractions for an Oxford audience. Of modern tragedy they only welcomed "Cato;" but that was written by an Oxford man, and after the classic model, and to see this, the play goers clustered round the doors at noon, and the death of Cato triumphed over the injuries of Cæsar everywhere.