Now I will divert your private grief by talking to you of what is called the public.  The King and Princess are grown as fond as if they had never been of different parties, or rather as people who always had been of different.  She discountenances all opposition, and he all ambition.  Prince George, who, with his two eldest brothers, is to be lodged at St. James’s, is speedily to be created Prince of Wales.  Ayscough, his tutor, is to be removed with her entire inclination as well as with everybody’s approbation.  They talk of a Regency to be established (in case of a minority) by authority of Parliament, even this session, with the Princess at the head of it.  She and Dr. Lee, the only one she consults of the late cabal, very sensibly burned the late Prince’s papers the moment he was dead.  Lord Egmont, by seven o’clock the next morning, summoned (not very decently) the faction to his house:  all was whisper! at last he hinted something of taking the Princess and her children under their protection, and something of the necessity of harmony.  No answer was made to the former proposal.  Somebody said, it was very likely indeed they should agree now, when the Prince could never bring it about; and so everybody went away to take care of himself.  The imposthumation is supposed to have proceeded, not from his fall last year, but from a blow with a tennis-ball some years ago.  The grief for the dead brother is affectedly displayed.  They cried about an elegy,[1] and added, “Oh, that it were but his brother!” On ’Change they said, “Oh, that it were but the butcher[2]!”

[Footnote 1:  The elegy alluded to, was probably the effusion of some Jacobite royalist.  That faction could not forgive the Duke of Cumberland his excesses or successes in Scotland; and, not contented with branding the parliamentary government of the country as usurpation, indulged in frequent unfeeling and scurrilous personalities on every branch of the reigning family: 

       Here lies Fred,
    Who was alive and is dead: 
       Had it been his father,
       I had much rather;
       Had it been his brother,
       Still better than another;
       Had it been his sister,
       No one would have missed her;
       Had it been the whole generation,
       Still better for the nation: 
       But since ’tis only Fred,
    Who was alive and is dead—­
       There’s no more to be said.

Walpole’s Memoirs of George II.]

[Footnote 2:  A name given to the Duke of Cumberland for his severities to his prisoners after the battle of Culloden.]

The Houses sit, but no business will be done till after the holidays.  Anstruther’s affair will go on, but not with much spirit.  One wants to see faces about again!  Dick Lyttelton, one of the patriot officers, had collected depositions on oath against the Duke for his behaviour in Scotland, but I suppose he will now throw his papers into Hamlet’s grave?