e, gentle, of unbounded charity, with
strong affections, which were not suffered to flow in a legitimate
channel, she became devotedly attached to Lord Hervey: her heart was
bound up in him; his death drove her into a permanent retreat from the
world. No debasing connection existed between them; but it is misery, it
is sin enough to love another woman's husband--and that sin, that
misery, was the lot of the royal and otherwise virtuous Caroline.

The Princess Mary, another victim to conventionalities, was united to
Frederick, Landgrave of Hesse Cassel; a barbarian, from whom she
escaped, whenever she could, to come, with a bleeding heart, to her
English home. She was, even Horace Walpole allows, 'of the softest,
mildest temper in the world,' and fondly beloved by her sister Caroline,
and by the 'Butcher of Culloden,' William, Duke of Cumberland.

Louisa became Queen of Denmark in 1746, after some years' marriage to
the Crown Prince. 'We are lucky,' Horace Walpole writes on that
occasion, 'in the death of kings.'

The two princesses who were still under the paternal roof were
contrasts. Caroline was a constant invalid, gentle, sincere,
unambitious, devoted to her mother, whose death nearly killed her.
Amelia affected popularity, and assumed the _esprit fort_--was fond of
meddling in politics, and after the death of her mother, joined the
Bedford faction, in opposition to her father. But both these princesses
were outwardly submissive when Lord Hervey became the Queen's
chamberlain.

The evenings at St. James's were spent in the same way as those at
Kensington.

Quadrille formed her majesty's pastime, and, whilst Lord Hervey played
pools of cribbage with the Princess Caroline and the maids of honour,
the Duke of Cumberland amused himself and the Princess Amelia at
'buffet.' On Mondays and Fridays there were drawing-rooms held; and
these receptions took place, very wisely, in the evening.

Beneath all the show of gaiety and the freezing ceremony of those
stately occasions, there was in that court as much misery as family
dissensions, or, to speak accurately, family hatreds can engender.
Endless jealousies, which seem to us as frivolous as they were rabid;
and contentions, of which even the origin is still unexplained, had long
severed the queen from her eldest son. George II. had always loved his
mother: his affection for the unhappy Sophia Dorothea was one of the
very few traits of goodness in a character utterly v