The king, however, would not admit of this excuse; and swore, if the arrears were not instantly paid, he would get another minister. "I am determined," said he, "not to be the only master in my dominions who does not pay his servants' wages." One day, it appears, that he was actually without a shilling in his pocket; for it is related that a half idiot labourer, while the king was inspecting the progress of some repairs at Kensington, having asked his majesty for something to drink, the king, although offended, was yet ashamed to refuse the fellow, and put his hand into the usual receptacle of his cash; but, to his surprise and confusion, found it empty. "I have no money," said he, angrily. "Nor I either," quoth the labourer; "and for my part, I can't think what has become of it all."

The latter years of George the Second's life were passed as regularly as clock-work. At night he had cards in the apartment of his daughters, the Princesses Amelia and Caroline, with Lady Yarmouth, two or three of the late queen's ladies, and as many of the most favoured officers of his own household. Every Saturday in summer, he carried that uniform party, but without his daughters, to dine at Richmond. They went in coaches and six, in the middle of the day, with the heavy horse-guards kicking up the dust before them, dined, walked an hour in the garden, and returned in the same dusty parade; and his majesty fancied himself the most lively prince in Europe. But although willing to be considered gallant to the last, it seems the king was too wise to take a young wife in his old days. When he was in Germany, in 1755, the Duchess of Brunswick Wolfenbüttel waited on him with her unmarried daughters; the elder of whom was so handsome and accomplished that the king wished his grandson, the heir-apparent, to marry her; who, however, influenced by his mother, declined the match. The king, on this occasion, told Lord Waldegrave, with great eagerness, that had he been only twenty years younger, she should not have been subjected to a refusal from the Prince of Wales, for he would at once have made her Queen of England.

Shortly before the king's death, an embarrassing accident happened at

court. The Duchess of Hamilton, previously the beautiful Miss Gunning, was presented to his majesty on her marriage: the king was greatly pleased with her natural elegance and artlessness of manner, and indulged in a long conversation with her, in the course of which he inquired what striking public sights she had witnessed. "Oh!" said the thoughtless duchess, "I have seen so much, that there is only one sight in the world which I wish to behold, and that is a coronation." The lady was not conscious of the slip she had made, till the king took her hand, and, with a sigh, exclaimed, "I apprehend you have not long to wait; you will soon have your desire."

On the 25th of October, 1760, he rose about his usual hour of seven, without any apparent indisposition. He called his page, drank his chocolate, and inquired the direction of the wind, as if anxious for the arrival of the foreign mails: he then opened the window, and said he would walk in the gardens. This passed while the page attended him at breakfast; but shortly after leaving the room, the page heard a deep sigh, immediately followed by a heavy fall, and returning hastily, found the king had dropped from his seat, as if in attempting to ring the bell; he said faintly, "Čall Amelia," and then expired. He was instantly raised, and laid upon the bed; the princess came as quickly as possible, and was told, on entering the room, that her father was no more; but being a little deaf, she did not understand what was said; she, therefore, ran up to the bed-side, and stooped tenderly over the king, thinking he might wish to speak to her in a low voice, but then discovered, to her horror and astonishment, that he was dead. On opening the body, all the vital parts appeared to have been in a decaying state, but the immediate cause of his death was a rupture of the right ventricle of his heart.

At his accession, he is described as having had a pleasing and expressive countenance, prominent eyes, and a Roman nose. In person he was wellproportioned, but below the middle size; which circumstance, a popular ballad of the day, alluding to Richard, afterwards Lord Edgecumbe, who was very diminutive, thus notices:

When Edgecumbe spoke, the prince, in sport,
Laugh'd at the merry elf;
Rejoic'd to see within his court

One shorter than himself.

"I'm glad," cried out the quibbling squire, "My lowness makes your highness higher."

The character of George the Second requires no nicety of delineation: its main features are broad, and glaringly obvious. His abilities were scarcely above mediocrity. He was decidedly brave, but possessed a very limited portion of military skill. Incontinency was his predominant failing, but he never suffered his sexual attachments to interfere materially with the public interest. His love of uniformity was so remarkable, that Lord Hervey said of him, "He seems to think his having done a thing to-day an unanswerable reason for his doing it to-morrow."

He neither felt nor affected the least admiration for art, science, or literature. He occasionally attended the theatres, but his dramatic taste was contemptible. When he attended the representation of Richard the Third, although Garrick supported the principal character, he thought the man who played the lord mayor was by far the best actor in the company; and said repeatedly, during the latter part of the performance, to one of his attendants,

Will not dat lor mayor come again? I like dat lor mayor; when will he come again?" One night he went to see The Mayor of Garratt acted at the Haymarket Theatre: on alighting at the entrance, he was received by Foote, grotesquely dressed for the part of Major Sturgeon. Perceiving so extraordinary a figure bowing and stumping about before him, the king turned to his lord in waiting, and, with amazement depicted in his looks, inquired who the man in regimentals was, and in what corps he served.

Few men were more deeply impressed with the value of money, although he occasionally startled those about him, by being unexpectedly liberal, as in the cases of his donation to the university of Cambridge, and his submitting to the extortion of the Dutch inn-keeper. One evening, while passing by a closet in which wood was kept for the use of the bed-chamber, he dropped some guineas, one of which having rolled under the door, he said to the page in waiting,

"We must get out this guinea: let us remove the fuel." In a short time, with the attendant's aid, he found the guinea, which, however, he gave to his fellowlabourer, as a reward for the exertions of the latter, in helping him to take the wood out of the closet, observing, "I do not like any thing to be lost, but I wish every man to receive the value of his work."

He was strongly attached to etiquette; but on many occasions, as in the preceding and following instances, he appears to have liberated himself, almost unconsciously, and with amusing oddity, from its trammels. One afternoon, a person who had been passing an hour or two with some of the royal servants, in an upper apartment of the palace, on his return, slipping down a flight of steps, burst open the door of a room at the foot of them, with such involuntary violence, that he fell, completely stunned, on the floor. When he recovered his senses, he found himself extended on the carpet, in a snug apartment, under the hands of a neat little old gentleman, who washed his head very carefully with a towel, and applied sticking-plaster to the cuts which he had received in his fall. When this was done, the little old gentleman picked up the intruder's wig and placed it properly on the head of its owner; who now rose, and was about to express his gratitude for the kindness which had been shewn to him, but his benefactor, with a dignified frown, pointed to the door, and the man retired in amazement. The room into which he had fallen was the royal closet; and the good Samaritan, it is scarcely necessary to add, was the king himself.

The

Of the hastiness of George the Second's temper, several examples have been given: but it was never, perhaps, more ludicrously displayed than in his first interview with Dr. Ward. king, having been afflicted for some time with a violent pain in his thumb, for which his regular medical attendants could afford him no relief, he sought the assistance of Ward, whose famous pills and drops were then in great estimation. The doctor, being aware of the king's complaint, went to the palace, at the time commanded, with, it is said, a specific concealed in the hollow of his hand. On being admitted to his ma

jesty's presence, he, of course, proceeded to examine the royal thumb; which he suddenly wrenched with such violence, that the king called him a cursed rascal, and condescended to kick his shins. He soon found, however, that the doctor, had as it were, magically relieved his thumb from pain and so grateful did he feel to Ward, whom he now termed his Esculapius, that he prevailed on him to accept a handsome carriage and horses, and shortly afterwards, presented his nephew, who subsequently became a general, with an ensigncy in the guards.

Like his father, George the Second had a strong predilection for his continental dominions; which was sometimes thwarted, and occasionally taken advantage of, by his ministers. Lord Granville, wishing to procure the appointment of Dr. Taylor to the residentiary of St. Paul's, obtained his point

with ease, notwithstanding the king started some scruples at first, by affirming, that the doctor's learning was celebrated all over Germany!

In a conversation with Waldegrave, the king said that his British subjects were angry at the partiality he displayed towards the electorate; although he desired nothing more to be done for Hanover, than what we are bound to do for any country whatever, when it was exposed to danger entirely on our account. The king added the following among other curious remarks, on this occasion: he allowed the English constitution to be a good one, and defied any man to show that he had infringed it in a single instance; but that as to our laws, we passed nearly a hundred every session, which seemed made only to afford us the pleasure of breaking them.

THIS princess, daughter of George the First, by the unfortunate heiress of Zell, was born in 1684, and, though wholly neglected by her father, became, under the care of her grand-mother, the Electress Sophia, a highly accomplished and amiable woman. She was married on the 28th of November, 1706, to Frederick William, of Brandenburg, who shortly after became King of Prussia.

The queen was by no means a happy wife, or a joyful mother. Her children, one of whom was Frederick the Great, were separated from her in their infancy; and, like their mother, lived in constant dread of their father's stupid and capricious tyranny. This parsimonious barbarian scarcely allowed his consort a sufficient income for her subsistence so that, but for a paltry although most acceptable allowance, of £800 per annum, privately transmitted to her by George the Second, she would have been destitute of all the comforts and even many of the necessaries of life.

Never, says Voltaire, were subjects poorer, or king more rich. According to that author (whose statements, however, must be taken cum grano salis), he

bought up the estates of his nobility at a despicable price; farmed out his lands to tax-gatherers, each of whom held the double post of collector and judge: so that if a tenant did not pay his rent on the day it became due, the collector put on his judicial robes, and condemned the defaulter in double the debt; and if the collector and judge did not pay the king his arrears in full, on the last day of the month, the following morning his majesty mulcted him in the same ratio, as he had mulcted the landholder. The king had an ambassador at the Hague, who, having cut down and used for fuel, some of the trees in the garden of Houslardick, which then belonged to the royal house of Prussia, his most gracious sovereign, as he was informed by his next despatches, stopped his year's salary to defray the damage. The poor ambassador, in a fit of despair, cut his throat with the only razor he had; but his life was saved by an old valet, who happened to come to his assistance. The king had a hundred and twenty millions of crowns in the cellars of his palace; his apartments were filled with articles of massive silver; and he gave to his queen, in charge only be it observed, a cabinet,

the contents of which were all gold. When he took his walk through the town, after having reviewed his regiment of guards, many of whom were seven feet high, every body fled at his approach. If he met a woman in the street he would tell her to begone home, and at the same time give her a kick, a box on the ear, or a few strokes on the shoulders with his cane. His son, wearied with his brutality, determined to quit the country; but parental economy had deprived him of the means of travelling, even as the son of an English tradesman; and he was obliged to borrow a few hundred ducats for his intended journey. Two young men, one named Kat, and the other Keit, were to have accompanied him; but the king obtained information of the project, and arrested the trio. Keit afterwards escaped; but Kat was executed, and the prince's head was held out of a window, by some grenadiers, at his father's command, in order that he might be obliged to behold the melancholy spectacle. On another occasion, the king ordered the daughter of a schoolmaster, for whom his son had affected a passion, to be conducted round Potzdam, where she resided, by the common hangman, and then whipped in the prince's presence. After having regaled him with this spectacle, he sent him to a citadel in the midst of a marsh, where he kept him for six months in a sort of dungeon, without a single servant; and

then graciously permitted him to have a soldier for an attendant. Suspecting that his daughter Wilhelmina was concerned in the prince's intended elopement, he proceeded to kick her out of a large window, which reached from the ceiling to the floor; and her mother, (the subject of our present article,) who was present at this achievement, with great difficulty saved her, by catching hold of her petticoats. The princess, continues Voltaire, received a contusion on her left breast, which mark of her father's affection she preserved through life, and did me the honour of permitting me to see it.

The queen survived her brutal husband; and in the affectionate and dutiful solicitude of her son, whom his father once thought of beheading, as Voltaire states, because he wrote verses, she found many consolations for the evening of her days. Her health had never been robust, yet she lingered on through many years of great bodily and mental suffering, till the spring of 1757, when she expired in the seventy-third year of her age.

Formed to be the charm and grace of an amiable and polished circle, she was consigned to the arms of a savage, who, totally insensible to her fascinations, and incapable of appreciating her fine qualities, treated her so unjustly, that it may with truth be said, there was scarcely a greater slave in Prussia than its queen.

FREDERICK LEWIS, eldest son of George the Second, was born at Hanover, on the 20th of January, 1707. Great pains were apparently taken to teach him the English language, but he was by no means well educated. His morals were so wretchedly neglected, that in childhood, he was remarkable for treachery and deceit; and while yet a youth, drank, gambled, and even kept mistresses. One day, says Walpole, when the prince was but a mere boy, his governor was complaining of him: the queen, whose way, as the king

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said, was to excuse him, said, "Ah! je m'imagine que ces sont des tours de pages. The governor replied, Plût a Dieu que ces fussent des tours de pages! Ces sont des tours de laquais et de coquins." When this hopeful youth became a man, we find him, on one occasion, exultingly exclaiming, "I have just nicked Doddington out of £5,000, and he has no chance of ever getting it again." Nearly all the vices of his younger days seem to have grown up with him: and his laxity of principle, even at mature years, was so evident,