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IN THE DAYS OF THE DUKE: so runs a local saying, much as we
speak of the "good old times." His amiable laughter-loving ghost
pervades the capital to this hour. His pleasantries still resound among
those crumbling theatres and galleries. That gleeful deviltry of his,
compounded of blood and sunshine, is the epitome of Nepenthe. He is the
scarlet thread running through its annals. An incarnation of all that
was best in the age he identified, for wellnigh half a century, his
interests with those of his faithful subjects.
He meditated no conquests. It sufficed him to gain and to retain the
affection of men in whose eyes he was not so much a prince, a feudal
lord, as an indulgent and doting father. He was the ideal despot, a man
of wide culture and simple tastes. "A smile," he used to say, "will
sway the Universe." Simplicity he declared to be the keynote of his
nature, the guiding motive of his governance. In exemplification
whereof he would point to his method of collecting taxes--a marvel of
simplicity.


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