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HERVEY'S MEMOIRS
221

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." And all the while, as so often—Lord Hervey tells it of another occasion when George was explaining the singularlv inappropriate pictures which he had brought over from Hanover to hang in the Queen's drawing-room—the only friend the Queen could rely upon, "whilst he was peeping over his Majesty's shoulder at these pictures, was shrugging up his own, and now and then stealing a look to make faces at the Queen, who, a little angry, a little peevish, and a little tired with her husband's absurdity, and a little entertained with his lordship's grimaces, used to sit and knot in a corner of the room, sometimes yawning and sometimes smiling, and equally afraid of betraying those signs either of her lassitude or of her mirth."[1]

As time went on, and after a new entanglement in Hanover, George from uncivil became absolutely brutal, "abominably and perpetually so harsh and rough, that she could never speak one word uncontradicted, nor do any act unreproved; and though the Queen, whilst she knew the King's heart was as warm to her as his temper, could, for the sake of the agreeable advantages she reaped from the one, support and forgive the irksome inconveniences she

  1. Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 84.