persons together were not found elsewhere in
Europe for parts and ingenuity." Wilkins
was the man who tried to establish a universal
language, and so nullify the fatal curse of
Babel; Hooke was an astronomer, who was
jealous of Newton, and claimed to have
discovered the law of gravitation; and Petty was one
of the most active founders of the Royal Society.
The great days of Durdans were when
Frederick, Prince of Wales, the son of George
the Second, came to reside there. It was this
patron of dancing masters and toadies who
first gave rise to the saying, "That whether
there was peace or war abroad, there was sure
to be family discord among the Guelphs." His
sisters despised him; his strutting, little,
demoralised father pronounced him a puppy,
fool, and scoundrel; his mother cursed the
hour in which he was born; and the prime
minister described him as a poor, weak,
irresolute, false, lying, dishonest, contemptible
wretch. While still a lad he drank and
gambled. "Ah! the tricks of pages," said his
mother to his father. "No," replied the bear
leader; "I wish to Heaven they were they
are the tricks of lacqueys, rascals!" One day
looking out from a window at St. James's, he
saw Bubb Doddington roll by. "There,"
said the estimable prince, "there goes a man
they call the most sensible fellow in England;
yet, with all his cleverness, I have just nicked
him out of five hundred pounds." He joined
the Opposition to spite his father and Sir
Robert Walpole; and earned his father's
undying hate by removing his wife when she was
in actual labour from Hampton Court to St.
James's Palace, from whence he was very soon
"quoited" to Kew. His mother on her death-
bed refused to insult his father by seeing him.
During the '45 Rebellion, he showed some
feeble desire to lead the army, being jealous
of his truculent brother, the Duke of
Cumberland; but the fool's ambition subsided into
having a model of Carlisle Castle made in
confectionery, and bombarding it with sugar-
plums at the head of his maids of honour and
mistresses. Eventually the poor creature died
from a cold caught by putting on a thin silk
coat in the month of March, during a fit of
pleurisy. In a fit of coughing, he broke an
internal abscess, which had been caused by a
blow from a tennis ball, cried out "I feel
death!" and died almost immediately. The
bitter Jacobite epitaph upon him was only too
just:

          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.

Some traditions of Fred still linger about
Epsom.

An obelisk (the flint of which went to face
St. Martin's Church, in the town) that formerly
stood at the end of an avenue of walnut trees
in the Common Fields, marked the spot of
Fred's only victory. The prince, one morning,
walking alone in his white silk coat, espied a
specially sable sweep, sitting contemplatively
under one of the trees, perhaps fatigued with
the ascent of the palace chimneys. Fred,
indignant at such an unmannered churl coming
between the wind and his nobility, bade him
begone, and at once. The tired sweep, espying a
fop or a footman, he hardly knew which, refused,
point blank. The prince flourished his clouded
cane, which the sweep wrenched from his hand
and threw away, then stripped and offered
combat. The prince, with a spark of the spirit
of his grandsire at Dettingen, removed his silk
coat and fell to. Tradition, generally loyal,
affirms that the sweep was beaten; but there
certainly are calumnious reports that the sweep
conquered, and set his black foot on the wizen
neck of Bubb Doddington's noble friend. Other
local historians make George the Third (when
a boy) the adversary and conqueror of the
sweep; such is History. Soon after Fred's
lamented death, a Mr. Belchier rebuilt Durdans,
but a fire destroyed the place, and one of the
Heathcotes reared the present structure of red
brick bound with stone. Certain it is that
young Prince George was much here at the
time when the populace were so jealous of his
mother's unwise intimacy with handsome Lord
Bute. The only other recollection of royalty
at Epsom is at Woodcote Park, where the
drive to the Racecourse has been closed ever
since the Queen used it in 1840, her last visit
to Epsom, at which place she is then
supposed to have taken umbrage.

The crow flutters down for a moment on
Pitt-place, that old mansion by the church.
This house was the scene of one of the
best authenticated, and yet most easily
explained ghost stories than ever befooled the
superstitious. It was the residence of Lord
Lyttleton, secretary to Frederick, Prince of
Wales, and author of the History of Henry the
Second, and who leading the prince to
patronise Mallet, Thomson, Pope, Glover, and Dr.
Johnson, gained him the only credit he ever
got or deserved. It gives us pain to observe
that the worthy nobleman's History is
wretchedly dull, and his poetry, all but the monody
to his wife, intolerable. The son of this
worthy peer was a celebrated rake, who, a
short time before his death, declared that he
had seen a white dove flutter over his bed,
look mournfully on him, then disappear. A
short time after, the corpse of a woman clothed
in white appeared by his bedside, and waved
her livid hand, as she placed her face close to
him, and uttered the words, "Lord Lyttleton,
prepare to die!" he felt her cold breath, and
saw that her eyes were glazed. He gasped
out, "When?" and the apparition replied,
"Ere three days you must die." This dead
woman was a Mrs. Amphlett, who had died of
grief in Ireland on the seduction of her two