pictures of the men, women, and manners of the time, and the interior of the Court of George III. "Evelina" was written in St. Martin's Street. When published, in 1778, it excited an immense sensation, all the more when it was discovered to be the maiden work of a girl of twenty-five, popularly supposed to be six years younger. Dr. Burney lived here between 1770 and 1789, when he removed to Chelsea Hospital, on his appointment as organist there, an appointment which he owed to his friend Burke.

CHAPTER X.

THE POUTING-PLACE OF PRINCES.

HIS designation of Pennant's for
Leicester House during the first
half of last century is appropriate
For most of the time

as well as alliterative.

between 1717 and 1760, Leicester House was the town residence of the Princes of Wales, when a Prince of Wales was always at deadly feud with the head of his house. In those days of personal rule and personal politics, it was natural that, as the King was the centre of Government, the heir-apparent should be the centre of Opposition. Every little root of bitterness between King and Prince was carefully cultivated, every mole-hill built up into a mountain, every pin-prick rubbed into a sore, by gossiping women, mischief-mak

ing courtiers, or place-hunting politicians. Plots of the Palace and of Parliament, intrigues of the back-stairs, the boudoir and the office run into each other till the tangled web defies unravelling. Shown in the fierce light that beats upon a throne, the life of trivial occupation, small struggles, sordid selfishnesses, petty plots, and dirty dexterities, recorded in such memoirs as Hervey's, or such a diary as Bubb Dodington's, seems about the most uninviting that can occupy the mind of an historian. One is apt to think that never was a King so dull, selfish, and sordid as George I.; so ill-tempered, ill-mannered, and altogether illconditioned as George II.-never courts at once so dull and so indecorous, never lives so profligate, yet so wanting in all grace, colour, and spice, even of sin, as those of these officers of the household, these ladies of the bedchamber, these maids of honour-never family quarrels at once so unnatural and unmeaning as those of the Kings, Queens and Princes of the first two generations of the House of Hanover. But we forget the fulness, as well as fierceness, of the light in which these lives are shown-that it is the Court chronicle of times when Kings, Queens

and Princes had no homes in which the public and political relations of subject and sovereign, king and courtier could awhile be put aside for the pure and wholesome intercourse of husband and wife, parent and child. Of all the blessings for which English sovereigns have to be grateful, there is none greater than the change of personal rule for Parliamentary, which has rendered home life with its affections, occupations and duties possible for royal families now, as it was not possible for those whose history connects itself with Leicester House.

That history has been told in all its unattractive detail, and with wonderful vividness, conscious or unconscious, by actors in it as conspicuous as Hervey and Chesterfield, Bubb Dodington and Walpole, Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Mrs. Howard and her correspondents, by Pope, Swift, Gay, and their circle of literary lords and wits, poetasters and pamphleteers; in the abundant sketches of manners by the contemporary essayists; in the pictures of Hogarth and the portraits of Reynolds, to say nothing of such later masters as

Thackeray. There is no period, indeed, more

completely illustrated both with pen and pencil. I here confine myself to the points by which it is specially associated with Leicester House while occupied by Prince George Augustus and Prince Frederick of Wales.

Prince George's feud with his father had its deepest root in his sympathy with his hapless mother, Sophia Dorothea, doomed to life-long imprisonment, sequestration of royal rights, and separation from her children, on a charge of criminal intrigue with Philip Count Königsmarck, who was a pupil in Major Faubert's Academy when his elder brother was acquitted of complicity in the murder of Tom of Ten Thousand. He had been a page at the Court of Zelle, and a playmate of Sophia Dorothea's, its young Princess. And when, some years after her marriage with the dour, dull, unfaithful, and unlovable Electoral Prince of Hanover, Philip Count Königsmarck appeared at the little Hanoverian Court in all the éclat of his youth, beauty, and gallantry, no wonder he should have found a warm welcome 1

1 I share Dr. Doran's belief, which Thackeray thinks so extravagant, in the innocence of the Princess's relations with Königsmarck.

1