[Illustration: DINING HALL, WESTMINSTER SCHOOL.]
He was a pretty boy. Something like his royal mother in her younger days; for she is described as a "sylph-like creature" when a girl, though she afterwards grew to be the mountain of fat we know in most of her portraits. His face was oval; and for the most part glowed with a fine colour. His shape was fine, his body easy, and his arms finely hung.[115]
His disposition was naturally a sweet one; and he was admirably loyal to his friends and attendants, always willing to take blame himself rather than allow another to be scolded. But his weak health, a strong will, and a hot temper made him liable to fits of passion in which he lost all control over himself. Jenkin Lewis describes some of these outbursts of fury, and one in particular when he was the object of the prince's wrath. Jenkin quietly turned him round to the looking-glass, so that the boy might see what a shocking spectacle he was making of himself. Whereupon his passion fell as quickly as it had risen. He grew calm upon seeing himself, and expressed his sorrow.
When he was nine years old, the king appointed Bishop Burnet to be his preceptor, and the Duke of Marlborough to be his governor.
The Bishop writes two years later, that he had made "amazing progress." They had read together the Psalms, Proverbs and Gospels, and the bishop had explained things that fell in his way "very copiously, and was often surprised at the questions he put me, and the reflections that he made. He came to understand things relating to religion beyond imagination."[116] Besides religion the good bishop seems to have crammed his pupil's head with a mass of knowledge--geography, forms of government in every country, the interests and trades of every nation, the history "of all the great revolutions that had been in the world;" and he explained "the Gothic constitution and the beneficiary and feudal laws."
No wonder that as one historian says, "his tender constitution bended under the weight of his manly soul, and was too much harass'd by the vivacity of his genius, to be of long duration.... In a word, he was too forward to arrive at maturity."[117]
On July 24, 1700, the Duke of Gloucester was eleven years old. The next day Bishop Burnet tells that he complained a little: but every one thought he was tired with his birthday festivities. The day after he grew rapidly worse. A malignant fever declared itself, and he "died on the fourth day of his illness, to the great grief of all who were concerned with him." He was buried quite quietly, in the same vault as his great-uncle Henry, Duke of Gloucester, beside their common ancestress, Mary, Queen of Scots.