ment,
slept on the outside of the queen's bed all that night; so that the
unhappy invalid could get no rest, nor change her position, not daring
to irritate the king's temper.

The next day the queen said touchingly to her gentle, affectionate
daughter, herself in declining health, 'Poor Caroline! you are very ill,
too: we shall soon meet again in another place.'

Meantime, though the queen declared to every one that she was sure
nothing could save her, it was resolved to hold a _levee_. The foreign
ministers were to come to court, and the king, in the midst of his real
grief, did not forget to send word to his pages to be sure to have his
last new ruffles sewed on the shirt he was to put on that day; a trifle
which often, as Lord Hervey remarks, shows more of the real character
than events of importance, from which one frequently knows no more of a
person's state of mind than one does of his natural gait from his
dancing.

Lady Sundon was, meantime, ill at Bath, so that the queen's secret
rested alone in her own heart. 'I have an ill,' she said, one evening,
to her daughter Caroline, 'that nobody knows of.' Still, neither the
princess nor Lord Hervey could guess at the full meaning of that sad
assertion.

The famous Sir Hans Sloane was then called in; but no remedy except
large and repeated bleedings were suggested, and blisters were put on
her legs. There seems to have been no means left untried by the faculty
to hasten the catastrophe--thus working in the dark.

The king now sat up with her whom he had so cruelly wounded in every
nice feeling. On being asked, by Lord Hervey, what was to be done in
case the Prince of Wales should come to inquire after the queen, he
answered in the following terms, worthy of his ancestry--worthy of
himself. It is difficult to say which was the most painful scene, that
in the chamber where the queen lay in agony, or without, where the
curse of family dissensions came like a ghoul to hover near the bed of
death, and to gloat over the royal corpse. This was the royal
dictum:--'If the puppy should, in one of his impertinent airs of duty
and affection, dare to come to St. James's, I order you to go to the
scoundrel, and tell him I wonder at his impudence for daring to come
here; that he has my orders already, and knows my pleasure, and bid him
go about his business; for his poor mother is not in a condition to see
him act his false, whining, cringing tricks now, nor am I in a humour t