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earliest hint Lord Mahon finds of this vice in Charles, is in a letter of April, 1747, addressed to Lord Dunbar, but only signed by the initial of the writer. It alleges that an Irish Cordelier, named Kelly, has of late been much in the Prince's society and confidence; that Kelly loves good wine with all the fervour of a monk; and that, by this means, "His Royal Highness's character in point of sobriety has been a little blemished." A century before, Lord Clarendon reproaches the banished loyalists with intemperance, at all times the fatal resource of poverty, and sorrow; but the Prince who could not relieve them by his bounty, should at least have forborne from degrading them by his example.†

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There is something of interest in noting from time to time, as they casually occur, some of the occasions on which, during Charles's priva tions in the Highlands, he sought or obtained relief from the bottle or the bowl, and so unconsciously formed a habit that was eventually ruinous to his peace and to his reputation. For instance, in Balshair's narrative of his sojourn in the Long Island, we read: "He called a dram, being the. first article of a Highland entertainment; which being over, he called for meat." "The Young Gentleman advises Edward Burke to fill the bowl. Then we began with our bowl, frank and free. . . We continued this drinking for three days and three nights. He still had the better of us, and even of Boisdale himself, notwithstanding his being as able a bowlsman, I dare say, as any in Scotland." As Kingsburgh's guest, in Skye, he expressed himself highly delighted with the toddy his host brewed for him in a small china punch-bowl, which was emptied over and over again, until Kingsburgh felt it his ungracious duty, to urge a withdrawal "to-bed, to-bed, to-bed," which Charles opposed, moving as amendment "another bowl." Kingsburgh resisted. Charles insisted. Charles insisted. And at last they came, if not to blows, at least to breakage, for a tussle about the bowl ensued, which caused the fracture of that little vessel,-Charles retaining one fragment of it in his hands, and Kingsburgh the other. In which admired disorder the good meeting was perforce broken up.

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On resorting to Lochiel's hovel at Mellaneuir, on the mainland, where an anker of whisky awaited him, the Prince, upon his entry, took a hearty dram, which he pretty often called for thereafter, to drink his friends' healths."-In an old boat on the river Lochy at night, six bottles of brandy were produced by Clunes Cameron. "Will your Royal Highness take a dram?" asked Lochiel. "Oh," said the Prince, can you have a dram here? . . . Come let us have it." Whereupon three bottles were drunk. Before the Prince next "called for a dram," the three remaining bottles were broken, in the hurry of ferrying the crazy boat over the river-a loss that Charles laid to heart sincerely enough..

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During his sojourn in the forest-house of Glencorldale in South Uist, the Prince would often "step into a by-chamber, which served as a pantry, and, when he stood in need of it, put the bottle of brandy to his head without ceremony." Parson Forbes relates how Charles " made a plentiful supper" (washed down ad interim by "twa bottles of sma' beer,") with Kingsburgh and his wife-and how, supper over, his Royal Highness, according to the orthodox formula, for such occasions made and provided (and acted up to, as well), “called for a dram," and upon the bottle of

* Life of the Earl of Clarendon by himself, vol. i. p. 353, ed. 1827. See Mahon, vol. iii. pp. 351 sq., and Appendices, ed. 1853.

Lyon in Mourning, MS., V. 192. Quoted in Chambers, 291, ed. 1847.

brandy being duly produced, "he said he would fill the glass for himself, 'for,' said he,' I have learned in my skulking to take a hearty dram.' He filled up a bumper, and drank it off to the happiness and prosperity of his landlord and landlady."* These, and other like circumstances, as Mr. Robert Chambers remarks, are mentioned by the reporters, without apparently the remotest idea that the habits of the Prince were in danger of being permanently affected; but their value as testimony is not the less on that account. "Charles had previously, like most natives of southern Europe, been unaccustomed to liquor. On such a person the drinking customs of the people amongst whom he fell were calculated to have a fatal effect. It would also appear, from what we every day see amongst the miserably poor, that there is a condition of defective physical comfort in which alcohol presents itself as a remedy and compensation, and in that character is scarcely to be resisted by human weakness. This law is of course as ready to operate upon a prince, suddenly reduced to personal misery, as upon a wretch who has long known it, and perhaps even more so. Probably the habits originally contracted under physical discomfort were, in the Prince's case, revived and confirmed afterwards under the anguish of a disappointed and exasperated spirit, which had unfortunately not been trained to look for superior consolations."+

The testimonies to his weakness for the bottle and the bowl, multiply portentously with advancing years. In 1755, the Jacobite party in England received from one Dawkins a very unfavourable account of the Prince's manner of life, as that of a systematic debauchee, whose excesses imperilled not only his health but his very existence. In 1769, he caused prodigious scandal, and dealt the Stuart cause a heavy blow and great discouragement, by dismissing all his Scotch attendants while himself in a drunken fit, and supplying their place with Italians. Extenuating reports are extant of this and similar incidents in the life of a confirmed sotbut the most favourable of them, that by Bishop Forbes for example, allow it to be "true, indeed, that the k- has been in use, for some time past, to call frequently for t'other glass of wine at dinner and supper" though, as the loyal allegators maintain, "not from any liking to liquor, but like one absent in mind, when he met with things that vexed him, as too often was the case." Too often by some seven days in the week, one is constrained to fear. For the answer Charles practically gave to the song-book query, Which is the properest day to drink? was identical with the comprehensive conclusions of that chanson itself. He abhorred invidious distinctions in such a case, and anything like undue preference of one day over another. Let all the days of the week share and share alike, and let none be left out, no, not one.

Women, as well as wine, marred the welfare and hampered the movements of the Prince. His perverse adherence to his obnoxious mistress, the Walkinshaw,-not, he strenuously declared, out of any violent passion for her, but because he would not be dictated to,-cost him some of his best friends, when days were dark and friends were few.-As to matters matrimonial, Charles had, in his youth, formed the resolution of marrying only a Protestant princess. But in 1772, at the age of fifty-two, he

* Lyon in Mourning, iii. 589, ii. 209 (Clanranald's Journal, Forbes's MS. collections, &c.)

† Chambers's Hist. of Rebel. of '45, p. 403.

wedded a Roman Catholic bride, of twenty; and for a few years the Count and Countess of Albany, as they were called, managed to "rub along" together at Florence, "a harsh husband and a faithless wife;" until at length, in 1780, tired out by the Prince's peculiarities, and attracted from another quarter, the lady eloped. Alfieri received her with, rather too literally, open arms. M. Villemain remarks on the "something singular" in Alfieri's destiny, in connexion with this elopement business. Cet ardent ami de la liberté found himself bound by ties to one who had been wife of the Pretender to England's crown- "of that Prince Edward who so bravely uplifted the doomed banner of the Stuarts, in the plains of Scotland; who was conquered-wandered about Europe-married-and came to Florence to die in obscurity, betrayed by the wife of his choice. Singular enough! Alfieri, that ardent enemy to arbitrary power, in order to indulge a passion that morality rebukes, invoked against the last of the Stuarts a sort of coup d'état by which the unhappy prince was deprived of the society of a companion, his conduct towards whom is charged with guilt."*

On the last day of the year 1780, Horace Walpole thanked Sir Horace Mann much for what he calls the curious history of the Count and Countess of Albany;-appending to his much thanks, this ethical annex: "What a wretched conclusion of a wretched family! Surely no royal race was ever so drawn to the dregs!" And that miscellaneous readers of Walpole's by no means private and confidential correspondence might be at no loss to understand the historical allusion, and appreciate the moral reflection, Horace subjoined a foot-note explanatory, which runs thus: "The Pretender's wife complaining to the Great Duke [of Florence] of her husband's beastly behaviour to her, that prince contrived her escape into a convent, and thence sent her to Rome, where she was protected by the Cardinal of York, her husband's brother." On the second day of the new year, Horace is regaling my Lady Ossory with this bonne bouche of scandal, fresh as imported from the manufactory, at Florence itself. "The ancient sovereigns of this isle are come to a non plus too. The Countess of Albany is retired into a convent. You know they live at Florence. Last St. Andrew's day, who is the favourite saint there too, the Count got so beastly drunk, that at night every filthy consequence ensued. The Countess complaining, he tore her hair, and endeavoured to strangle her. Her screams alarmed the family, and saved her. She privately acquainted the Great Duke, and by his authority and connivance she contrived to take shelter in a convent, declaring she will never return to her husband again, who has in vain reclaimed her from the Great Duke." More than three years afterwards the same pink of polite letter-writers tells the same news-loving Countess his latest from Florence: "Florence is the nearest spot whence I hear any news. The dying Pretender has acknowledged his natural daughter [by Miss Walkinshaw] Lady Charlotte Stuart, and created her Duchess of Albany, and declared her his heiress. I heard a report some time ago in town, that his queen, as soon as she is dowager, intends to come to England, and marry Alfieri, who is or was here, being sent out of Rome at the in

* Villemain, Tableau du XVIIIme Siècle, t. iii.
Walpole to Mann, Dec. 31, 1780.

Walpole to the Countess of Ossory, Jan. 2, 1781.

stance of the Cardinal of York."* Subsequent epistles abound in references to dowager and natural daughter, after the decease of ce dernier des Stuart. But it is only with any casual reference to Charles himself that our further citations from Walpole are concerned. As where he tells Lady Ossory that the King of Sweden, when last. in Florence, found the Count of Albany in a wretched condition, destitute even of an exchequer to pay his household; and that his Majesty "imparted his sympathy at the opera-to whom, think you, Madam ? only to the minister of the Count's rival;"-that is, to Sir Horace Mann, envoy to the Court of Florence, of his Britannic Majesty, George the. Third, Defender of the Faith, and other good things, in the Stuart's room and stead.. Or where mention is made of the validity accorded to Charles Edward's testamentary dispositions, by Papal authority: "The pantomime carrying on at Florence and Rome is entertaining. So, the Pope, who would not grant the title of King to the Pretender, allows his no-Majesty to have created a Duchess; and the Cardinal of York, who is but a rag of the Papacy, and who must think his brother a King, will not allow her title! Well! it is well they have not power to do worse, nor can spill the blood of others in their foolish squabbles."

The creating his daughter Duchess of Albany, which Lord Mahon calls "the last exercise of an expiring prerogative," was consequent upon the secession of his wife, and his reception of that daughter into the deserted home. The young lady was about twenty at the time, and survived her father only one Her year. presence in the house was the one consolation of his sexagenarian solitude, unless we take account of his doting interest in the prophecies of Nostradamus. To the last he cherished a flickering hope in the possibility of a summons to England, to accomplish in the eighteenth century a not less Glorious Restoration than his namesake and great-uncle enjoyed in the seventeenth. That he might obey the summons at an hour's notice, nay, without half an hour's delay, the poor old prince kept a strong-box, containing twelve thousand sequins, under his bed.

When he returned to Rome with his daughter in 1785, it was as a confirmed invalid, who had already, and more than once, been given over as a dead man. But he dragged on the lengthening chain of existence somehow, until the opening month of 1788, when a paralytic stroke removed him from the land of the living. It was a centenary of mournful import to the Stuarts, that of '88. And the day of his death was a tragical anniversary in the annals of that house-the thirtieth of January. So averse, indeed, were the dead Prince's attendants from recognising the ominous identity of date with that of his great-grandfather's execution at Whitehall, that the thirty-first of January was publicly announced to have been the actual day of Charles Edward's death.

His brother the Cardinal-who afterwards lived and died a pensioner of the House of Hanover-performed the funeral rites at Frascati, whence the coffin was afterwards removed to St. Peter's at Rome. And there a monument was erected at the charges, it is said, of the same safelyenthroned House of Hanover-and from the chisel of Canova, in memoriam not only of Charles the Third, but of his father James the Third, and of his brother Henry the Ninth, all three of them titular (though neither by act of men, nor by grace of God) Kings of England.

* Walpole to Lady Ossory, Aug. 19, 1784.

† Ibid., Nov. 12, 1784.

Walpole to Mann, Jan. 4, 1785.

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"PICTOR IGNOTUS:" A BIOGRAPHY.*

NOTWITHSTANDING the words we have just transcribed, from the titlepage of Mr. Gilchrist's work, its subject-the painter-poet Blake-is sufficiently remembered, as an eccentric artist, an intolerant critic, and a poet of most obscure fancies. He had a high opinion of his own talents, and had little respect for those who ventured to make deductions from his estimate. In the words of his present biographer, he was ment one-sided enthusiast.”

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That, after a lapse of between thirty and forty years, two portly volumes, richly embellished, should be devoted to the record of his life and labours, we should think incredible if they were not upon our table while we write. Unless, indeed, we are to consider them as an offering of friendship to his memory rather than a publisher's speculation. Few, however, of the circle in which his lengthened years were passed can yet be living. Mr. Gilchrist died before the completion of his work; but that two or three are still left we learn from a preface, written in a tone of subdued sorrow by his widow, as well as from passages in the volumes themselves.

The principal incidents of the life of Blake can be brought within a very narrow compass. He was born in 1757, the son of a small tradesman in the dingy neighbourhood of Broad-street, Golden-square. He began his career with Stothard and Flaxman as his contemporaries, and with Reynolds as President of the Academy, and he ended with the era of Wilkie and of Turner. Beyond reading and writing he had the merit of being self-educated; making progress even to the last. In acquiring a knowledge of languages-at least superficially-he seems to have always had considerable readiness. He learnt Italian when seventy-six years old. Though town-bred, his first boyish delights were

The pomp of groves and garniture of fields,

and he peopled them with imaginary beings: for one of his earliest manifestations of an ill-balanced mind was the habit of mistaking ideas for realities. On returning from his long rambles over the Surrey hills,. he would tell them at home, in serious earnestness, of having seen a tree filled with angels, "bright angelic wings bespangling every bough with stars." At another time of having seen angelic beings walking amongst the haymakers who were but bad company, we fear, for angels; and his prosaic father, being sure that he had seen nothing of the kind, was only prevented by the intercession of Mrs. Blake from thrashing him for telling falsehoods.

His childish love of art was not discouraged by his parents; but he had to cultivate it practically by being placed, at the age of fourteen, as

*Life of William Blake, "Pictor Ignotus," with Selections from his Poems and other Writings. By the late Alexander Gilchrist, of the Middle Temple, Barrister-at-Law, Author of the "Life of William Etty, R.A." Illustrated from Blake's own Works, in fac-simile, by W. J. Linton, and in Photolithography; with a few of Blake's original Plates. Two Vols. London and Cambridge:

Macmillan and Co. 1863.

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