On August 26, 1737, it was reported over London that the Queen was dead. The report was unfounded, or at least premature. Caroline had had a violent attack, but she rallied and was able to go about again at Hampton Court with the King. On Wednesday, November 9, 1737, she was suddenly stricken down, and this was her death-stroke. She did not die at once, but lingered and lingered. There are few chapters of history more full of strange, sardonic contrast, and grim, ghastly humor, than those which describe these death-bed scenes. The Queen, undergoing a succession of painful operations; now groaning and fainting, now telling the doctors not to mind her foolish cries; now indulging in some chaff with them--"Is not Ranby [the surgeon] sorry it isn't his own cross old wife he is cutting up?"--the King sometimes blubbering, and sometimes telling his dying wife that her staring eyes {116} looked like those of a calf whose throat had been cut; the King, who, in his sudden tenderness and grief, would persist in lying outside the bed, and thereby giving the poor, perishing sufferer hardly room to move; the messages of affected condolence arriving from the Prince of Wales, with requests to be allowed to see his mother, which requests the mother rejects with bitterness and contempt--all this sets before us a picture such as seldom, happily for the human race, illustrates a death-bed in palace, garret, or prison cell. The King was undoubtedly sincere in his grief, at least for the time. He did love the Queen in a sort of way; and she had worked upon all his weaknesses and vices and made herself necessary to him. He did not see how life was to go on for him without her; and as he thought of this he cried like a child whose mother is about to leave him. Over and over again has the story been told of the dying Queen's appeal to her husband to take a new wife after her death, and the King's earnest disclaimer of any such purpose; the assurance that he would have mistresses, and then the Queen's cry of cruel conviction from hard experience, "Oh, mon Dieu, cela n'empeche pas!" "I know," says Lord Hervey, who tells the story, "that this episode will hardly be credited, but it is literally true." One does not see why the episode should hardly be credited, why it should not be taken at once as historical and true. It is not out of keeping with all other passages of the story, it is in the closest harmony and symmetry with them. The King always made his wife the confidante of his amours and intrigues. He had written to her once, asking her to bring to Court the wife of some nobleman or gentleman, and he told her frankly that he admired this lady and wanted to have her near him in order that he might have an intrigue with her, and he knew that she, his wife, would always be glad to do him a pleasure. Thackeray, in his lecture, often speaks of the King as "Sultan George." George had, in the matter of