"Duke, I know you won't mind my asking you, but is it true that you were
surprised at Waterloo?"

"By G----! not half as much surprised as I am now, mum."

When the Queen came to the throne her first public act was to go in
state to St. James's Palace to be proclaimed. She naturally wished to be
accompanied in her State coach only by the Duchess of Kent and one of
the Ladies of the Household; but Lord Albemarle, who was Master of the
Horse, insisted that he had a right to travel with her Majesty in the
coach, as he had done with William IV. The point was submitted to the
Duke of Wellington, as a kind of universal referee in matters of
precedence and usage. His judgment was delightfully unflattering to the
outraged magnate--"The Queen can make you go inside the coach or outside
the coach, or run behind like a tinker's dog."

And surely the whole literary profession, of which the present writer is
a feeble unit, must cherish a sentiment of grateful respect for the
memory of a man who, in refusing the dedication of a song, informed Mrs.
Norton that he had been obliged to make a rule of refusing dedications,
"because, in his situation as Chancellor of the University of Oxford, he
had been _much exposed to authors_."




III.

LORD SHAFTESBURY.