Arbuthnot," says he, in one of his letters to Stella, dated 17th September, 1711, "made me draw up a sham subscription for a book, called a History of the Maids of Honour, since Henry the Eighth ;' showing how they make the best wives; with a list of all the Maids of Honour since, &c.; to pay a crown in hand, and t'other crown upon delivery of the book; and all in the common form of these things. We got a gentleman to write it fair, because my hand is known; and we sent it to the Maids of Honour, when they came to supper. If they bite at it, 'twill be a very good court-jest; and the Queen will certainly have it.” he But, on the 5th of the month ensuing, says, "Mrs. Forester" (one of the Maids: it was the custom in those days to call un married as well as married ladies, mistress) : "taxed me yesterday, about the 'History of the Maids of Honour;' but I told her it was no jest of mine; for I found they did not relish it altogether well and I have enough already of a quarrel with that brute, Sir John Walters, who has been railing at me in all companies, ever since I dined with him; (telling them) that I abused the Queen's meat and drink, and said nothing at the table was good, and all a d-d lie; for, after dinner, commending the wine, I said I thought it was something small." How this was "commending" the wine, the Dean does not inform us. We hear nothing further of the proposed History; and little is known of her Majesty's Maids of Honour, except that they found the Court tiresome, and their rides with the Queen fatiguing. Anne considered exercise impera tively necessary to her great dinners and suppers, and her chocolate on going to bed; and as her corpulence prevented recourse to horseback, she had a chaise invented for her with great safety-wheels, in which, after having secured her own life and limbs from danger, she went pelting like a female Nimrod after a poor stag, who was thus to break his heart with fatigue and terror, in order to enable her Majesty to eat too much. For, that is the object on such occasions. The plea is, health and a reasonable appetite; but the result is, just enough health to encourage repletion, and make fat fatter. A revolting spectacle must that great fat woman have been, scourging and driving after the poor panting stag. It was not till the next reign, that the Maids of Honour came full again into bloom; and this was not due to George the First, who had left a divorced queen in Germany, but to his son, the prince of Wales, afterwards George the Second; whose wife, Caroline of Anspach, sprightly woman herself, got a congenial set of young ladies about her, who are famous to this day. a George the First, Elector of Hanover, who succeeded to the throne of these kingdoms as the next Protestant heir of Anne's Popish relations, had parted with his queen in Germany (Sophia Dorothea, of Zell) and even contrived to lock her up for life, on an allegation, never proved, of her infidelity with Count Köningsmark, brother of the Count Köningsmark, who assassinated Mr. Thynne in the hope of depriving him of a wealthy George's own life, meantime, and ever afterwards, with the usual injustice of his sex, was full of license. He was a short, round-featured, ease-loving, selfish, dull man ; not ill-natured, where he was not thwarted, but capable otherwise of hating stubbornly enough, as he did in the instances both of his wife and his son; the latter, perhaps, for some supposed likeness to Köningsmark, which was long a jest against the Hanover succession, with the partizans of the house of Stuart. George could not speak English; never cared to learn it; cared, in fact, for nothing but his ease, and his German diversions; that is to say, for his old habits, whatever they were; and, fortunately, for the English nation, he put its government, and its security from the Stuarts, into the hands of Sir Robert Walpole, who, if he was a |