ady to keep George and George's ministers
posted in the movements of the unhappy Prince they betrayed. George
could afford to be magnanimous, and George was magnanimous. If it
pleased the poor Pretender to visit, like a premature ghost, the city
and the scenes associated with his House and its splendor and its awful
tragedies, he did so untroubled and unharmed. It was but a cast of the
dice in Fortune's fingers, and Charles Edward would have been in
Westminster Hall and had a champion to assert his right. But the cast
of the dice went the other way, and George the Third was King, and his
little German Princess was Queen of England.

[Sidenote--1761--The London gayeties of the time]

It is probable that those early days in London were the happiest in the
little Queen's long life. She had come from exceeding quiet to a great
and famous city; she was the centre of splendor; she was surrounded by
splendid figures; she was the first lady of a great land; she was the
queen of a great king; she was the fortunate wife of a loyal,
honorable, and pure-minded man. She was young, she was frank, she was
fond of all innocent pleasures, keenly alive to all the entertainment
that Court and capital could offer her. She crammed more gayeties into
the first few days of her marriage than she had dreamed of in all her
previous life. The girl, who had never seen {15} the sea until she
took ship for England, had never seen a play acted until she came to
London. Mecklenburg-Strelitz had its own strong ideas about the folly
and frivolity of the stage, and no Puritan maiden in the sternest days
of Cromwellian ascendency, no Calvinist daughter of the most rigorous
Scottish household, could have been educated in a more austere
ignorance of the arts that are supposed to embellish and that are
intended to amuse existence. She went to playhouse after playhouse,
alarmed at the crowds that thronged the streets to see her, but
fascinated by the delights that awaited her within the walls. She
attended the opera. She saw "The Beggar's Opera," which may have
charmed her for its story without perplexing her by its satire. She
saw "The Rehearsal," and did not dream that twenty years later the
humors of Bayes, which she probably did not understand, would be
eclipsed forever by the fantasies of Mr. Puff. She carried the King to
Ranelagh, to that amazing, enchanting assembly where all the world made
masquerade, and mandarins, harlequins, shepherd