suggesting the notion that his Majesty sympathised
with vulgar infirmities, and found, as the old song says, 'that grief
and sorrow are dry.'

The prudence which for some years sealed my greatgrandfather's lips,
lapsed, after a time, into a careless and even boastful spirit, in which
he would allude to his rank in the peerage, the place he ought to
be holding, and so on: till at last, some of the Government people,
doubtless taking a liking to the snug house and demesne of Timmahoo,
denounced him as a rebel, on which he was arrested and thrown into gaol,
where he lingered for many years, and only came out at last to find his
estate confiscated, and himself a beggar.

There was a small gathering of Jacobites in one of the towns of
Flanders, and thither he repaired; but how he lived, or how he died,
I never learned. I only know that his son wandered away to the east of
Europe, and took service in what was called Trenck's Pandours--as jolly
a set of robbers as ever stalked the map of Europe, from one side to
the other. This was my grandfather, whose name is mentioned in various
chronicles of that estimable corps, and who was hanged at Prague
afterwards, for an attempt to carry off an archduchess of the empire,
to whom, by the way, there is good reason to believe he was privately
married. This suspicion was strengthened by the fact that his infant
child, Joseph, was at once adopted by the imperial family, and placed as
a pupil in the great military school of Vienna. From thence he obtained
a commission in the Maria Theresa Hussars, and subsequently, being sent
on a private mission to France, entered the service of Louis xvi.,
where he married a lady of the Queen's household--a Mademoiselle de la
Lasterie--of high rank and some fortune; and with whom he lived happily
till the dreadful events of 17--, when she lost her life, beside
my father, then fighting as a Garde du Corps, on the staircase at
Versailles. How he himself escaped on that day, and what were the next
features in his history, I never knew; but when again we heard of him,
he was married to the widow of a celebrated orator of the Mountain, and
he himself an intimate friend of St. Just and Marat, and all the most
violent of the Republicans.

My father's history about this period is involved in such obscurity, and
his second marriage followed so rapidly on the death of his first wife,
that, strange as it may seem, I never knew which of the two was my
mother--th