vents of this long reign, the statesmen and orators who illustrated it, I
do not pretend to make the subjects of an hour's light talk.(187) Let us
return to our humbler duty of Court gossip. Yonder sits our little queen,
surrounded by many stout sons and fair daughters whom she bore to her
faithful George. The history of the daughters, as little Miss Burney has
painted them to us, is delightful. They were handsome--she calls them
beautiful; they were most kind, loving, and ladylike; they were gracious
to every person, high and low, who served them. They had many little
accomplishments of their own. This one drew: that one played the piano:
they all worked most prodigiously, and fitted up whole suites of
rooms--pretty, smiling Penelopes,--with their busy little needles. As we
picture to ourselves the society of eighty years ago, we must imagine
hundreds of thousands of groups of women in great high caps, tight bodies,
and full skirts, needling away, whilst one of the number, or perhaps a
favoured gentleman in a pigtail, reads out a novel to the company. Peep
into the cottage at Olney, for example, and see there Mrs. Unwin and Lady
Hesketh, those high-bred ladies, those sweet, pious women, and William
Cowper, that delicate wit, that trembling pietist, that refined gentleman,
absolutely reading out _Jonathan Wild_ to the ladies! What a change in our
manners, in our amusements, since then!

[Illustration]

Lord North, Mr. Fox

[Illustration]

Mr. Pitt, Mr. Burke

King George's household was a model of an English gentleman's household.
It was early; it was kindly; it was charitable; it was frugal; it was
orderly; it must have been stupid to a degree which I shudder now to
contemplate. No wonder all the princes ran away from the lap of that
dreary domestic virtue. It always rose, rode, dined at stated intervals.
Day after day was the same. At the same hour at night the king kissed his
daughters' jolly cheeks; the princesses kissed their mother's hand; and
Madame Thielke brought the royal nightcap. At the same hour the equerries
and women in waiting had their little dinner, and cackled over their tea.
The king had his backgammon or his evening concert; the equerries yawned
themselves to death in the ante-room; or the king and his family walked on
Windsor slopes, the king holding his darling little princess A