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GEORGE THE FIRST.

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to say thus much by way of preface, because the subject of these lectures has been misunderstood, and I have been taken to task for not having given grave historical treatises, which it never was my intention to attempt. Not about battles, about politics, about statesmen and measures of state, did I ever think to lecture you: but to sketch the manners and life of the old world; to amuse for a few hours with talk about the old society; and, with the result of many a day's and night's pleasant reading, to try and while away a few winter evenings for my hearers.

VERY few years since, I knew | contrast them with our own. I have familiarly a lady, who had been asked in marriage by Horace Walpole, who had been patted on the head by George I. This lady had knocked at Dr. Johnson's door; had been intimate with Fox, the beautiful Georgina of Devonshire, and that brilliant Whig society of the reign of George III..; had known the Duchess of Queensberry, the patroness of Gay and Prior, the admired young beauty of the court of Queen Anne. I often thought as I took my kind old friend's hand, how with it I held on to the old society of wits and men of the world. I could travel back for seven score years of time-have glimpses of Brummell, Selwyn, Chesterfield, and the men of pleasure; of Walpole and Conway; of Johnson, Reynolds, Goldsmith; of North, Chatham, Newcastle; of the fair maids of honor of George II.'s court; of the German retainers of George I.'s; where Addison was secretary of state; where Dick Steele held a place; whither the great Marlborough came with his fiery spouse; when Pope, and Swift, and Bolingbroke yet lived and wrote. Of a society so vast, busy, brilliant, it is impossible in four brief chapters to give a complete notion; but we may peep here and there into that bygone world of the Georges, see what they and their courts were like; glance at the people round about them; look at past manners, fashions, pleasures, and

Among the German princes who sat under Luther at Wittenberg, was Duke Ernest of Celle, whose younger son, William of Lüneburg, was the progenitor of the illustrious Hanoverian house at present reigning in Great Britain. Duke William held his court at Celle, a little town of ten thousand people that lies on the railway line between Hamburg and Hanover, in the midst of great plains of sand, upon the river Aller. When Duke William had it, it was a very humble wood-built place, with a great brick church, which he sedulously frequented, and in which he and others of his house lie buried. He was a very religious lord, and was called William the Pious by his small circle of subjects, over whom he ruled till

fate deprived him both of sight and reason. Sometimes, in his latter days, the good Duke had glimpses of mental light, when he would bid his musicians play the psalm-tunes which he loved. One thinks of a descendant of his, two hundred years afterwards, blind, old, and lost of wits, singing Handel in Windsor Tower.

and bid every one be quiet and orderly, forbidding all cursing, swearing, and rudeness; all throwing about of bread, bones, or roast, or pocketing of the same. Every morning, at seven, the squires shall have their morning soup, along with which, and dinner, they shall be served with their under-drink-every morning, except William the Pious had fifteen chil- Friday morning, when there was dren, eight daughters and seven sons, sermon, and no drink. Every evenwho, as the property left among them ing they shall have their beer, and at was small, drew lots to determine night their sleep-drink. The butler which one of them should marry, and is especially warned not to allow noble continue the stout race of the Guelphs. or simple to go into the cellar wine The lot fell on Duke George, the shall only be served at the Prince's sixth brother. The others remained | or councillors' table; and every Monsingle, or contracted left-handed mar- day, the honest old Duke Christian riages after the princely fashion of ordains the accounts shall be ready, those days. It is a queer picture and the expenses in the kitchen, the that of the old Prince dying in his wine and beer cellar, the bakehouse little wood-built capital, and his seven | and stable, made out. sons tossing up which should inherit and transmit the crown of Brentford. Duke George, the lucky prizeman, made the tour of Europe, during which he visited the court of Queen Elizabeth; and in the year 1617, came as general in the army of the circle back and settled at Zell, with a wife out of Darmstadt. His remaining | brothers all kept their house at Zell, for economy's sake. And presently, in due course, they-all died all the honest Dukes; Ernest, and Christian, and Augustus, and Magnus, and George, and John and they are buried in the brick church of Brentford yonder, by the sandy banks of the Aller.

Duke George, the marrying Duke, did not stop at home to partake of the beer and wine, and the sermons. He went about fighting wherever there was profit to be had. He served

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of Lower Saxony, the Protestant army; then he went over to the Emperor, and fought in his armies in Germany and Italy; and when Gustavus Adolphus appeared in Germany, George took service Swedish general, and seized the Abbey of Hildesheim, as his share of the plunder. Here, in the year 1641, Duke George died, leaving four sons behind him, from the youngest of whom descend our royal Georges.

Dr. Vehse gives a pleasant glimpse of the way of life of our Dukes in Under these children of Duke Zell. When the trumpeter on the George, the old God-fearing, simple tower has blown," Duke Christian ways of Zell appear to have gone out orders — viz. at nine o'clock in the of mode. The second brother was morning, and four in the evening constantly visiting Venice, and leadevery one must be present at meals, ing a jolly, wicked life there. It was and those who are not must go with the most jovial of all places at the None of the servants, unless it end of the seventeenth century; and be a knave who has been ordered to military men, after a campaign, ride out, shall eat or drink in the rushed thither, as the warriors of the kitchen or cellar ; or, without special | Allies rushed to Paris in 1814, to leave, fodder his horses at the Prince's gamble, and rejoice, and partake of cost. When the meal is served in all sorts of godless delights. This the court-room, a page shall go round | Prince, then, loving Venice and its

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pleasures, brought Italian singers the gambling-table; swapped a battalion against a dancing-girl's diamond necklace; and, as it were, pocketed their people.

and dancers back with him to quiet old Zell; and, worse still, demeaned himself by marrying a French lady of birth quite inferior to his ownEleanor d'Olbreuse, from whom our Queen is descended. Eleanor had a pretty daughter, who inherited a great fortune, which inflamed her cousin, George Louis of Hanover, with a desire to marry her; and so, with her beauty and her riches, she came to a sad end.

It is too long to tell how the four sons of Duke George divided his territories amongst them, and how, finally, they came into possession of the son of the youngest of the four. In this generation the Protestant faith was very nearly extinguished in the family and then where should we in England have gone for a king? The third brother also took delight in Italy, where the priests converted him and his Protestant chaplain too. Mass was said in Hanover once more; and Italian soprani piped their Latin rhymes in place of the hymns which William the Pious and Dr. Luther sang. Louis XIV. gave this and other converts a splendid pension. Crowds of Frenchmen and brilliant French fashions came into his court. It is incalculable how much that royal bigwig cost Germany. Every prince imitated the French King, and had his Versailles, his Wilhelmshöhe or Ludwigslust; his court and its splendors; his gardens laid out with statues; his fountains, and water-works, and Tritons; his actors, and-dancers, and singers, and fiddlers; his harem, with its inhabitants; his diamonds and duchies for these latter; his enormous festivities, his gaming-tables, tournaments, masquerades, and banquets lasting a week long, for which the people paid with their money, when the poor wretches had it; with their bodies and very blood when they had none; being sold in thousands by their lords and masters, who gayly dealt in soldiers, staked a regiment upon the red at

As one views Europe, through contemporary books of travel in the early part of the last century, the landscape is awful-wretched wastes, beggarly and plundered; half-burned cottages and trembling peasants gathering piteous harvests; gangs of such tramping along with bayonets behind them, and corporals with canes and cats-of-nine-tails to flog them to barracks. By these passes my lord's gilt carriage floundering through the ruts, as he swears at the postilions, and toils on to the Residenz. Hard by, but away from the noise and brawling of the citizens and buyers, is Wilhelmslust or Ludwigsruhe, or Monbijou, or Versailles

it scarcely matters which, -near to the city, shut out by woods from the beggared country, the enormous, hideous, gilded, monstrous marble palace, where the Prince is, and the Court, and the trim gardens, and huge fountains, and the forest where the ragged peasants are beating the game in (it is death to them to touch a feather); and the jolly hunt sweeps by with its uniform of crimson and gold; and the Prince gallops ahead puffing his royal horn; and his lords and mistresses ride after him; and the stag is pulled down; and the grand huntsman gives the knife in the midst of a chorus of bugles; and 'tis time the Court go home to dinner; and our noble traveller, it may be the Baron of Pöllnitz, or the Count de Königsmarck, or the excellent Chevalier de Seingalt, sees the procession gleaming through the trim avenues of the wood, and hastens to the inn, and sends his noble name to the marshal of the Court. Then our nobleman arrays himself in green and gold, or pink and silver, in the richest Paris mode, and is introduced by the chamberlain, and makes his bow to the jolly Prince, and the gracious Princess; and is presented

It was the first Elector of Hanover who made the fortunate match which bestowed the race of Hanoverian Sovereigns upon us Britons. Nine years after Charles Stuart lost his head, his niece Sophia, one of many children of another luckless dethroned sovereign, the Elector Palatine, married Ernest Augustus of Brunswick, and brought the reversion to the crown of the three kingdoms in her scanty trousseau.

to the chief lords and ladies, and then | robbed of their rights - communities comes supper and a bank at Faro, laid waste faith, justice, commerce where he loses or wins a thousand trampled upon, and well-nigh depieces by daylight. If it is a German stroyed-nay, in the very centre of court, you may add not a little royalty itself, what horrible stains drunkenness to this picture of high and meanness, crime and shame! It life; but German, or French, or is but to a silly harlot that some of Spanish, if you can see out of your the noblest gentlemen, and some palace-windows beyond the trim-cut of the proudest women in the world, forest vistas, misery is lying outside; are bowing down; it is the price of hunger is stalking about the bare a miserable province that the King villages, listlessly following precarious ties in diamonds round his mistress's husbandry; ploughing stony fields white neck. In the first half of the with starved cattle; or fearfully tak- last century, I say, this is going on ing in scanty harvests. Augustus is all Europe over. Saxony is a waste fat and jolly on his throne; he can as well as Picardy or Artois; and knock down an ox, and eat one al- Versailles is only larger and not most; his mistress, Aurora von worse than Herrenhausen. Königsmarck, is the loveliest, the wittiest creature; his diamonds are the biggest and most brilliant in the world, and his feasts as splendid as those of Versailles. As for Louis the Great, he is more than mortal. Lift up your glances respectfully, and mark him eying Madame de Fontanges or Madame de Montespan from under his sublime periwig, as he passes through the great gallery where Villars and Vendôme, and Berwick, and Bossuet, and Massillon One of the handsomest, the most are waiting. Can Court be more cheerful, sensible, shrewd, accomsplendid; nobles and knights more plished of women, was Sophia, daughgallant and superb; ladies more love-ter of poor Frederick, the winter king ly? A grander monarch, or a more miserable starved wretch than the peasant his subject, you cannot look on. Let us bear both these types in mind, if we wish to estimate the old society properly. Remember the glory and the chivalry? Yes! Remember the grace and beauty, the splendor and lofty politeness; the gallant courtesy of Fontenoy, where the French line bids the gentlemen of the English guard to fire first; the noble constancy of the old King and Villars his general, who fits out the last army with the last crown-piece from the treasury, and goes to meet the enemy and die or conquer for France at Denain. But round all that royal splendor lies a nation enslaved and ruined: there are people

of Bohemia. The other daughters of lovely, unhappy Elizabeth Stuart went off into the Catholic Church; this one, luckily for her family, remained, I cannot say faithful to the Reformed Religion, but at least she adopted no other. An agent of the French King's, Gourville, a convert himself, strove to bring her and her husband to a sense of the truth; and tells us that he one day asked Madame the Duchess of Hanover, of what religion her daughter was, then a pretty girl of thirteen years old. The duchess replied that the princess was of no religion as yet. They were waiting to know of what religion her husband would be, Protestant or Catholic, before instructing her! And the Duke of Hanover having heard all

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Gourville's proposal, said that a change would be advantageous to his house, but that he himself was too old to change.

for I am a fool with my children." Three of the six died fighting against Turks, Tartars, Frenchmen. One of them conspired, revolted, fled to Rome, leaving an agent behind him, whose head was taken off. The daughter, of whose early education we have made mention, was married to the Elector of Brandenburg, and so her religion settled finally on the Protestant side.

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This shrewd woman had such keen eyes that she knew how to shut them upon occasion, and was blind to many faults which it appeared that her husband the Bishop of Osnaburg and Duke of Hanover committed. He loved to take his pleasure like other sovereigns was a merry prince, A niece of the Electress Sophia fond of dinner and the bottle; liked who had been made to change her reto go to Italy, as his brothers had ligion, and marry the Duke of Ordone before him; and we read how leans, brother of the French King; he jovially sold 6,700 of his Hanoveri- a woman whose honest heart was alans to the seigniory of Venice. They ways with her friends and dear old went bravely off to the Morea, under Deutschland, though her fat little command of Ernest's son, Prince body was confined at Paris, or Marly, Max, and only 1,400 of them ever or Versailles has left us, in her came home again. The German enormous correspondence (part of princes sold a good deal of this kind which has been printed in German of stock. You may remember how and French), recollections of the George III.'s Government purchased Electress, and of George her son. Hessians, and the use we made of Elizabeth Charlotte was at Osnaburg them during the War of Indepen- when George was born (1660). She dence. narrowly escaped a whipping for being in the way on that auspicious day. She seems not to have liked little George, nor George grown up; and represents him as odiously hard, cold, and silent. Silent he may have been; not a jolly prince like his father before him, but a prudent, quiet, selfish potentate, going his own way, managing his own affairs, and understanding his own interests remarkably well.

The ducats Duke Ernest got for his soldiers he spent in a series of the most brilliant entertainments. Nevertheless, the jovial Prince was economical, and kept a steady eye upon his own interests. He achieved the electoral dignity for himself: he married his eldest son George to his beautiful cousin of Zell; and sending his sons out in command of armies to fight -now on this side, now on that he lived on, taking his pleasure, and scheming his schemes, a merry, wise prince enough, not, I fear, a moral prince, of which kind we shall have but very few specimens in the course

of these lectures.

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In his father's lifetime, and at the head of the Hanover forces of 8,000 or 10,000 men, George served the Emperor, on the Danube against Turks, at the siege of Vienna, in Italy, and on the Rhine. When he succeeded to the Electorate, he handled its affairs with great prudence and dexterity. He was very much liked by his people of Hanover. He did not show his feelings much, but he cried heartily on leaving them; as they used for joy when he came back. He showed an uncommon prudence and coolness of behavior when he came into his kingdom; exhibiting no elation; rea

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