.

-- DEATH OF GEORGE I.
Gibraltar still keeps sputtering; ardent ineffectual bombardment from the one side, sulky, heavy blast of response now and then from the other: but the fire does not spread; nor will, we may hope.

It is true, Sweden and Denmark have joined the Treaty of Hanover, this spring; and have troops on foot, and money paid them; But George is pacific; Gibraltar is impregnable; let the Spaniards spend their powder there.
As for the Kaiser, he is dreadfully poor; inapt for battle himself.

And in the end of this same May, 1727, we hear, his principal ally, Czarina Catherine, has died;--poor brown little woman, Lithuanian housemaid, Russian Autocrat, it is now all one;--dead she, and can do nothing.
Probably the Kaiser will sit still?
The Kaiser sits still; with eyes bent on Gibraltar, or rolling in grand Imperial inquiry and anxiety round the world; war-outlooks much dimmed for him since the end of May.
Alas, in the end of June, what far other Job's-post is this that reaches Berlin and Queen Sophie?
That George I., her royal Father, has suddenly sunk dead! With the Solstice, or Summer pause of the Sun, 21st or 22d June, almost uncertain which, the Majesty of George I.did likewise pause,--in his carriage, on the road to Osnabruck,--never to move more.

Whereupon, among the simple People, arose rumors of omens, preternaturalisms, for and against: How his desperate Megaera of a Wife, in the act of dying, had summoned him (as was presumable), to appear along with her at the Great Judgment-Bar within year and day; and how he has here done it.