fortune's favourite 53 



True, Lord March was only legally heir-presump- 

 tive, as many instances are known of heir-presump- 

 tives being disappointed in their accession by the 

 birth of an heir-apparent. Charles James Fox is an 

 instance in particular. Lord March, however, accepted 

 the situation as it stood, and, meanwhile, continued to 

 take the care of his health he appears to have ever 

 exercised, and which many of his contemporaries 

 neglected, as their early deaths confirm. That this 

 precaution of his lordship's was a wise one will be 

 seen, as he had to wait over twenty-one years before 

 the strawberry leaves decked his brow. 



It is not improbable that the knowledge of this 

 exceeding good thing in store for him, as well as 

 those reasons which his better sense dictated, had a 

 great deal to do with Lord March's antipathy to the 

 senseless practice of duelling. 



Catharine, Duchess of Queensberry, does not seem 

 to have come, on her son's decease, into much closer 

 relations with her husband's heir-presumptive. Nor 

 does Lord March appear to have cultivated, further 

 than prudence and kinship dictated, his eccentric 

 relative's society. 



Her grace still maintained her position and charac- 

 ter. Her extravagances of conduct and speech were 

 attributed out of politeness to an agreeable freedom 



