man, with the grave
yawning before him."

When Sir Thomas Plumer was Master of the Rolls, and gave a succession of
dinners to the Bar, Romilly, alluding to Lord Eldon's stinginess, said,
"Verily he is working off the arrears of the Lord Chancellor."

At the back of the Rolls Chapel, in Bowling-Pin Alley, Bream's Buildings
(No. 28, Chancery Lane), there once lived, according to party calumny, a
journeyman labourer, named Thompson, whose clever and pretty daughter,
the wife of Clark, a bricklayer, became the mischievous mistress of the
good-natured but weak Duke of York. After making great scandal about the
sale of commissions obtained by her influence, the shrewd woman wrote
some memoirs, 10,000 copies of which, Mr. Timbs records, were, the year
after, burnt at a printer's in Salisbury Square, upon condition of her
debts being paid, and an annuity of L400 granted her.

Wilberforce's unscrupulous party statement, that Mrs. Clark was a low,
vulgar, and extravagant woman, was entirely untrue. Mrs. Clark, however
imprudent and devoid of virtue, was no more the daughter of a journeyman
bricklayer than she was the daughter of Pope Pius. She was really, as
Mr. Cyrus Redding, who knew most of the political secrets of his day,
has proved, the unfortunate granddaughter of that unfortunate man,
Theodore, King of Corsica, and daughter of even a more unhappy man,
Colonel Frederick, a brave, well-read gentleman, who, under the pressure
of a temporary monetary difficulty, occasioned by the dishonourable
conduct of a friend, blew out his brains in the churchyard of St.
Margaret's, Westminster. In 1798 a poem, written, we believe, by Mrs.,
then Miss Clark, called "Ianthe," was published by subscription at
Hookham's, in New Bond Street, for the benefit of Colonel Frederick's
daughter and children, and dedicated to the Prince of Wales. The girl
married an Excise officer, much older than herself, and became the
mistress of the Duke of York, to whom probably she had applied for
assistance, or subscriptions to her poem. The fact is, the duke's vices
were turned, as vices frequently are, into scourges for his own back. He
was a jovial, good-natured, affable, selfish man, an incessant and
reckless gambler, quite devoid of all conscience about debts, and,
indeed, of moral principle in general. When he got tired of Mrs. Clark,
he meanly and heartlessly left her, with a promised annuity which he
never paid, and with debts mutually incurred at t