esses, and
much-translated pagan divinities jostled each other through Armida's
gardens, where the pink of fashion and the plain citizen, the patrician
lady and the plebeian waiting-maid made merry together in a motley rout
of Comus, and marvelled at the brilliancy of the illuminations and the
many-colored glories of the fireworks.

The London to which the little Princess came, and which she found so
full of entertainment, was a very different London from the city for
which the first of the Georges had quitted reluctantly the pleasures of
Hanover and the gardens of Herrenhausen. The Hanoverian princes had
never tried, as the Stuart sovereigns had tried, to stop by peremptory
legislation the spread of the metropolis. London had been steadily
spreading in the half-century of Guelph dominion, eating up the green
fields in all directions, linking itself with little lonely hamlets and
tiny rustic villages, and weaving them close into the web of its being,
choking up rural streams and blotting out groves and meadows with
monuments of brick and mortar. Where {16} the friends of George the
First could have hunted and gunned and found refreshment in secluded
country ale-houses, the friends of George the Third were familiar with
miles of stony streets and areas of arid squares. London was not then
the monster city that another century and a half has made it, but it
was even more huge in its proportion to the size of any of its rivals,
if rivals they could be called, among the large towns of England. The
great city did not deserve the adjective that is applied to it by the
poet of Chevy Chase. London was by no means lovely. However much it
might have increased in size, it had increased very little in beauty,
and not at all in comfort, since the days when an Elector of Hanover
became King of England. It still compared only to its disadvantage
with the centres of civilization on the Continent; it still was rich in
all the dangers and all the discomforts Gay had celebrated nearly two
generations earlier. And these dangers and discomforts were not
confined to London. The world beyond London was a world of growing
provincial towns and increasing seaports connected by tolerable and
sometimes admirable highways, and of smaller towns and villages reduced
for the most part to an almost complete isolation by roads that were
always nearly and often quite impassable. To travel much in England in
those days was scarcely less adventu