Eldon's own tears were pumped very freely. Did these two
fountains gush together? I can't fancy a behaviour more unmanly, imbecile,
pitiable. This a Defender of the Faith! This a chief in the crisis of a
great nation! This an inheritor of the courage of the Georges! Many of my
hearers no doubt have journeyed to the pretty old town of Brunswick, in
company with that most worthy, prudent, and polite gentleman, the Earl of
Malmesbury, and fetched away Princess Caroline for her longing husband,
the Prince of Wales, Old Queen Charlotte would have had her eldest son
marry a niece of her own, that famous Louisa of Strelitz, afterwards Queen
of Prussia, and who shares with Marie Antoinette in the last age the sad
pre-eminence of beauty and misfortune. But George III had a niece at
Brunswick: she was a richer princess than her Serene Highness of
Strelitz:--in fine, the Princess Caroline was selected to marry the heir to
the English throne. We follow my Lord Malmesbury in quest of her; we are
introduced to her illustrious father and royal mother; we witness the
balls and fetes of the old Court; we are presented to the princess
herself, with her fair hair, her blue eyes, and her impertinent
shoulders--a lively, bouncing, romping princess, who takes the advice of
her courtly English mentor most generously and kindly. We can be present
at her very toilette, if we like, regarding which, and for very good
reasons, the British courtier implores her to be particular. What a
strange Court! What a queer privacy of morals and manners do we look into!
Shall we regard it as preachers and moralists, and cry, Woe, against the
open vice and selfishness and corruption; or look at it as we do at the
king in the pantomime, with his pantomime wife, and pantomime courtiers,
whose big heads he knocks together, whom he pokes with his pantomime
sceptre, whom he orders to prison under the guard of his pantomime
beefeaters, as he sits down to dine on his pantomime pudding? It is grave,
it is sad, it is theme most curious for moral and political speculation;
it is monstrous, grotesque, laughable, with its prodigious littlenesses,
etiquettes, ceremonials, sham moralities; it is as serious as a sermon,
and as absurd and outrageous as Punch's puppet-show.

Malmesbury tells us of the private life of the duke, Princess Caroline's
father, who was to die, like his warlike son, in arms against the French;
presents us to his courtiers, his favourite; his duchess, Ge