the
ladies, no doubt); seven officers in the wine and beer cellars; four bread
bakers; and five men in the plate-room. There were 600 horses in the
Serene stables--no less than twenty teams of princely carriage horses,
eight to a team; sixteen coachmen; fourteen postilions; nineteen ostlers;
thirteen helps, besides smiths, carriage-masters, horse-doctors, and other
attendants of the stable. The female attendants were not so numerous: I
grieve to find but a dozen or fourteen of them about the Electoral
premises, and only two washerwomen for all the Court. These functionaries
had not so much to do as in the present age. I own to finding a pleasure
in these small-beer chronicles. I like to people the old world, with its
everyday figures and inhabitants--not so much with heroes fighting immense
battles and inspiring repulsed battalions to engage; or statesmen locked
up in darkling cabinets and meditating ponderous laws or dire
conspiracies--as with people occupied with their every-day work or
pleasure: my lord and lady hunting in the forest, or dancing in the Court,
or bowing to their serene highnesses as they pass in to dinner; John Cook
and his procession bringing the meal from the kitchen; the jolly butlers
bearing in the flagons from the cellar; the stout coachman driving the
ponderous gilt wagon, with eight cream-coloured horses in housings of
scarlet velvet and morocco leather; a postilion on the leaders, and a pair
or a half-dozen of running footmen scudding along by the side of the
vehicle, with conical caps, long silver-headed maces, which they poised as
they ran, and splendid jackets laced all over with silver and gold. I
fancy the citizens' wives and their daughters looking out from the
balconies; and the burghers over their beer and mumm, rising up, cap in
hand, as the cavalcade passes through the town with torchbearers,
trumpeters blowing their lusty cheeks out, and squadrons of jack-booted
life-guardsmen, girt with shining cuirasses, and bestriding thundering
chargers, escorting his highness's coach from Hanover to Herrenhausen: or
halting, mayhap, at Madame Platen's country house of Monplaisir, which
lies half-way between the summer palace and the Residenz.

In the good old times of which I am treating, whilst common men were
driven off by herds, and sold to fight the emperor's enemies on the
Danube, or to bayonet King Louis's troops of common men on the Rhine,
noblemen passed from Court to Court, seeking serv