The senators were ready to stifle the new queen with panegyrics and
addresses; the people, though they adored the old king, were transported
with having a new sovereign, and the university, according to custom
immemorial, presented her majesty, three months after every body had
forgotten the event, with testimonials of the excessive sorrow and
excessive joy they felt on losing one monarch and getting another.
Her majesty was now in the fifth year of her age, and a prodigy of sense
and goodness. In her first speech to the senate, which she lisped with
inimitable grace, she assured them that her [2] heart was entirely
Irish, and that she did not intend any longer to go in leading-strings,
as a proof of which she immediately declared her nurse prime-minister.
The senate applauded this sage choice with even greater encomiums
than the last, and voted a free gift to the queen of a million of
sugar-plumbs, and to the favourite of twenty thousand bottles of
usquebaugh. Her majesty then jumping from her throne, declared it was
her royal pleasure to play at blindman's-buff, but such a hub-bub arose
from the senators pushing, and pressing, and squeezing, and punching one
another, to endeavour to be the first blinded, that in the scuffle her
majesty was thrown down and got a bump on her forehead as big as a
pigeon's egg, which set her a squalling, that you might have heard her
to Tipperary.
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