nsibility--with a certain conviction that at some fancied slight, some
sneer which he imagined, he would turn upon me and stab me. Can you trust
the queen? She is not of our order: their very position makes kings and
queens lonely. One inscrutable attachment that inscrutable woman has. To
that she is faithful, through all trial, neglect, pain, and time. Save her
husband, she really cares for no created being. She is good enough to her
children, and even fond enough of them: but she would chop them all up
into little pieces to please him. In her intercourse with all around her,
she was perfectly kind, gracious, and natural; but friends may die,
daughters may depart, she will be as perfectly kind and gracious to the
next set. If the king wants her, she will smile upon him, be she ever so
sad; and walk with him, be she ever so weary; and laugh at his brutal
jokes, be she in ever so much pain of body or heart. Caroline's devotion
to her husband is a prodigy to read of. What charm had the little man?
What was there in those wonderful letters of thirty pages long, which he
wrote to her when he was absent, and to his mistresses at Hanover, when he
was in London with his wife? Why did Caroline, the most lovely and
accomplished princess of Germany, take a little red-faced staring
princeling for a husband, and refuse an emperor? Why, to her last hour,
did she love him so? She killed herself because she loved him so. She had
the gout, and would plunge her feet in cold water in order to walk with
him. With the film of death over her eyes, writhing in intolerable pain,
she yet had a livid smile and a gentle word for her master. You have read
the wonderful history of that death-bed? How she bade him marry again, and
the reply the old king blubbered out, "_Non, non: j'aurai des
maitresses_." There never was such a ghastly farce. I watch the
astonishing scene--I stand by that awful bedside, wondering at the ways in
which God has ordained the lives, loves, rewards, successes, passions,
actions, ends of his creatures--and can't but laugh, in the presence of
death, and with the saddest heart. In that often-quoted passage from Lord
Hervey, in which the queen's death-bed is described, the grotesque horror
of the details surpasses all satire: the dreadful humour of the scene is
more terrible than Swift's blackest pages, or Fielding's fiercest irony.
The man who wrote the story had something diabolical about him: the
terrible verses which Pope w