In the rest of the school business, said the master to him
one day, "you just keep on this side whipping."
His smaller habits were none remarkable, except that his diet was rather
more blameable in the article of wine. A little too early; a little too
much.
This, probably, more than any hereditary taint, made him, in immediate
manhood, a martyr to the gout.
Against this, his ancestor's nostrum was tried in vain; the disease
would not yield, till it was overborne by abstinence, which, to the
praise of the duke's temper, he began and continued, with a splendour of
resolution not any where exceeded.
~79~~The duke had been long estranged from all animal food but fish, and
every fermented liquor. According to the old Latin distich, the poetry
of a water-drinker is said to be short-lived, and not fit to live:
was this proverbial doom extended to what was not poetry, it might be
checked by the prose of the Duke of Portland. Most of his common letters
were among the models of epistolary correspondence.
The Duke of Beaufort{14} exhibited at school more of the rudiments of
a country gentleman, than the rudiments of Busby; he knew a horse
practically, while other boys took it only from description in Virgil.
_Stare loco nescit_, was however his motto; and through all the demesnes
adjacent to his little reign, on the water, and in the water, he was
well; on horseback he was yet better; and to ride, or tie, on foot, or
on horseback, no boy of his time was more ready at every good turn.
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