rate of Hanover from
the English Crown, in order that Hanover might be given to her second
son. With the outer public the Prince of Wales seems to have been
popular in a certain sense, perhaps for no other reason than because he
was the Prince of Wales and not the King. When he went to one of the
theatres he was loudly cheered, and he took the applause with the
gratified complacency of one who knows he is receiving nothing that he
has not well deserved. He would appear to have been continually
posturing and attitudinizing as the young favorite of the people. The
truth is that the people in general knew very little about the prince,
and knew a good deal about the King, and naturally leaned to the side
of the man who might at least turn out to be better than his father.

Even the seraphic realms of music were invaded by the dispute between
the adherents of the King and the adherents of the prince. The King
and Queen were supporters {51} of Handel, the prince was against the
great composer. The prince in the first instance declared against
Handel because his sister Anne, the Princess of Orange, was one of
Handel's worshippers, therefore a great number of the nobility who
sided with the prince set up, or at least supported, a rival
opera-house to that in which Handel's music was the great attraction.
The King and Queen, Lord Hervey tells, were as much in earnest on this
subject as their son and daughter, though they had the prudence to
disguise it, or to endeavor to disguise it, a little more. They were
both Handelists, "and sat freezing constantly at his empty Haymarket
opera, whilst the prince, with all the chief of the nobility, went as
constantly to that of Lincoln's Inn Fields." "The affair," Hervey
adds, "grew as serious as that of the Greens and the Blues under
Justinian at Constantinople; an anti-Handelist was looked upon as an
anti-courtier, and voting against the Court in Parliament was hardly a
less remissible or more venial sin than speaking against Handel or
going to the Lincoln's Inn Fields Opera." Hervey was a man of some
culture and some taste; it is curious to observe how little he thought
of the greatest musician of his time, one of the very greatest
musicians of all time. The London public evidently could not have been
gifted with very high musical perception just then. Indeed, later on,
when Handel brought out his "Messiah," it was met with so cold and
blank a reception in London that the comp