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not; but for the picture with the dirty frame over the door, and the three nasty little children, I will have them taken away, and the old ones restored; I will have it done to-morrow morning, before I go to London, or else I know it will not be done at all.'

"Would your Majesty,' said Lord Hervey, have the gigantic fat Venus restored too?'

"Yes, my Lord; I am not so nice as your Lordship. I like my fat Venus, much better than anything you have given me instead of her.' """*

Lord Hervey thought, though he did not dare to say, that, if his Majesty had liked his fat Venus as well as he used to do, there would have been none of these disputations.

* This inuendo would seem to charge Lord Hervey with being one of the procurers of Mistresses for his Majesty.

However, finding his jokes on this occasion were as little tasted, as his reasonings approved, and that the King, as usual, grew more warm and peremptory on everything that was said. to cool and alter him, his Lordship was forced to make a serious bow; and though he knew the fat Venus was at Windsor, some of the other pictures at Hampton Court, and all the frames of the removed pictures cut or enlarged to fit their successors, he assured his Majesty that everything should be done without fail, next morning, just as he had ordered.

"Lord Hervey told the Queen, next morning at breakfast, what had passed the night before; who affected to laugh, but was a good deal displeased, and more ashamed. She said, 'The King, to be sure, was master of his own furniture;' and asked Lord Hervey if the

pictures were changed; who told her, no, and why it was impossible they should. She charged him not to tell the King why, but to find out some other reason. Whilst they were speaking, the King came in, but, by good luck, said not one word of the pictures; his Majesty stayed about five minutes in the gallery; snubbed the Queen, who was drinking chocolate, for being always stuffing; the Princess Emily for not hearing him; the Princess Caroline for being grown fat; the Duke of Cumberland for standing awkwardly; Lord Hervey for not knowing what relation the Prince of Sultzbach was to the Elector Palatine; and then carried the Queen to walk, and be re-snubbed, in the garden.

"When the Queen declared she intended to stay at Kensington till the King came back

(from another of his visits to Hanover), the Prince (of Wales, Frederick, father of George the Third), who had a mind to go to London for the same reason that the Queen avoided it, which was, because he thought his Majesty would dislike it, told the Queen, his expenses at Kensington were so great, and his lodgings there were so damp, that he intended to remove to London; and would fain have drawn her in, either to consent to this design, or to lay her commands upon him not to put it into execution; but he could bring neither of these things about-she declined both" The Prince, therefore, "made Kensington his séjour principal (as he called it), for the rest of the time the Court stayed at Kensington; that is, he left the Princess's Maids of Honour, and some of the male servants constantly there; but the Princess

and he seldom lay there above one or two nights in the week."

What sort of visitor this young man was considered by the family, may be supposed, from the dismal fact, that he was hated by every one of them, father and mother not excepted. His sisters openly avowed their contempt for him: the king

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pronounced him a puppy," "fool," and "scoundrel:" and the Queen "cursed the hour in which he was born." Even the good-natured minister described him as a

poor, weak, irresolute, false, lying, dishonest, contemptible wretch." Unfeeling levity appears to have been the main point of his character. It is the expression of his face in his portraits. One of his modes of annoying his mother at Kensington, was by coming too late to chapel, and making his

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