an urn, which, according to tradition, was raised by Lord Bute in honour of his royal mistress, but which, in fact, was erected in the days of the former possessors of Luton, the Napiers, to the memory of some lamented scion of their house. But, if the visitor will raise his glance to some height up the pillar, he will be rewarded by detecting a brief Latin inscription, bearing date the year in which the princess died; the same being a silent, yet eloquent tribute from the fallen minister to the memory of the royal lady whose friendship and sympathy had so often consoled him in hours of difficulty and danger, and when his name had become a byword of reproach and contempt.

The neglect which, for nearly a third of a century after his loss of power, Bute continued to encounter from the world, certainly presents, when contrasted with his former brilliant and coveted position, a sad and humiliating example of the vanity of human greatness. To his old friend, Home, he writes on the 25th of March, 1773: "Think, my friend, of my son Charles being refused everything I asked! I have not had interest to get him a company, while every alder

man of a petty corporation meets with certain success. I am now in treaty, under Lord Townshend's wing, for dragoons in Ireland: if I don't succeed, I will certainly offer him to the emperor." During the last quarter of a century of Lord Bute's life, he appears to have principally resided, in almost complete retirement, in a marine villa, which he had built on the edge of the cliff at Christchurch, in Hampshire, overlooking the Needles and the Isle of Wight. "" Here," we are

told, "his principal delight was to listen to the melancholy roar of the sea, of which the plaintive sounds were probably congenial to a spirit soured by what he believed to be the ingratitude of mankind."

"Populi contemnere voces

Sic solitus; populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo
Ipse domi."

- Horat., Sat. i. lib. 1.

Lord Bute died at his house in South Audley Street, on the 10th of March, 1792, in his seventy-ninth year.

'The son referred to by Lord Bute was the late Lieut-Gen. Sir Charles Stuart, K. B. He died March 26, 1801, in his fortyninth year.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE REV. WILLIAM COLE.

THIS laborious literary antiquary, whose voluminous MS. collections have so long proved serviceable to the student of history and antiquities, was the son of William Cole, a landed proprietor in Cambridgeshire, in which county his son was born at Little Abington, near Baberham, on the 3d of August, 1714. At Eton, where he studied for five years on the foundation, he is said to have impressed himself on the minds of his schoolfellows chiefly as a quiet, studious boy, devoted to curious old books with quaint frontispieces. Nor was this the only indication which he then gave of precocious antiquarian predilections. During his Eton vacations, for instance, it was his delight to employ himself in copying armorial bearings from the painted glass windows of such churches as were accessible to him; Baberham Church, and Moulton Church in Lincolnshire, being among those included in his archæological peregrinations. Having probably from the want of a timely vacancy — missed his fair chances of being elected

to King's College, the young antiquary, on the 25th of January, 1733, was entered by his friends. as a student at Clare Hall, Cambridge, at which college he was still residing when, by the death of his father, on the 14th of January, 1735, he came into possession of the neighbouring paternal estate. By this augmentation of his worldly means, he was not only enabled to enter himself a gentleman commoner at King's College, where he could enjoy the double advantages of superior apartments and accommodation with the society of his old Eton associates, but became, as a proprietor of the soil, a person of some slight consideration in the county in which he was pursuing his studies as an undergraduate. In 1736 he took his degree as B. A., and in 1740 as M. A. In 1739 he was appointed a justice of the peace for Cambridgeshire, and in 1740 a deputy-lieutenant of that county.

It was not till Cole had exceeded the age of thirty, that he carried into effect the resolution at which he had arrived, of making the Church his profession; and accordingly, in December, 1744, he was admitted into deacon's, and in 1745 into priest's, orders. The first preferment which he held in his new calling was the rectory of Hornsey, in Middlesex, to which he was collated by Bishop Sherlock in November, 1749, but which, in consequence of the rectory house being in a ruinous condition, and the bishop nevertheless

insisting on his residing among his parishioners, he resigned in January, 1751, into other hands. He was in the next instance presented, in 1753, to the rectory of Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire; a living, however, which, as in the former case, he retained but for a limited period; resigning it spontaneously, on the 20th of March, 1768, as impelled by his sense of justice and duty, to his patron's grandson, the Rev. Thomas Willis.

Apparently, the next feature of any interest in the generally uneventful career of the Cambridge antiquary was a visit of instruction and pleasure which he paid to the Continent in 1765, in company with his old schoolfellow, correspondent, and friend, Horace Walpole. From neither Walpole's letters, written during their absence, nor from the diary kept by Cole during their excursion, does it appear that any event of marked interest or importance occurred to either in the course of their peregrinations.

With the exception of a temporary domicile at Waterbeche, in Cambridgeshire, Cole's constant place of habitation, after he had resigned the living of Bletchley in 1768, was Milton, near Cambridge, from which circumstance he derived his once familiar designation of "Cole of Milton," and at which spot he passed the remainder of his days. Not that his long continuance at Milton was the result of any want of encouragement to fix his abode elsewhere. On the 10th of June,