detail of this dumb show had its secret meaning. This farce was played not once but many times, over and over again, and though the means were sorry enough, the end was the good of the nation. The personal rule of the monarch as it had existed in the days of the Stuarts was gone for ever; still the King was a force to be reckoned with, and, in foreign politics especially, Walpole would have found the choleric little George a terrible stumbling-block in his path had it not been that the Queen bent him to her will. The King would often announce his intention of doing something incredibly foolish, she would apparently agree with him, yet before long she would bring him round to her point of view, though it was in flat contradiction to his first declaration. When the King set his face against a certain plan of the Prime Minister’s or a certain appointment, Walpole would leave the matter in the Queen’s hands, and by and by the King would suggest to him the very policy or appointment he had opposed, as though it were an idea of his own. Caroline talked her sentiments into her husband’s mind and he reproduced them as faithfully as words talked into a phonograph. In public the Queen was always obedient, and her manner to the King was submission itself. “She managed this deified image,” says Lord Hervey, “as the heathen priests used to do the oracles of old, when, kneeling and prostrate before the altars of a pageant god, they received with the greatest devotion and reverence those directions in public which they had before instilled and regulated in private. And as these idols consequently were only propitious to the favourites of the augurers, so nobody who had not tampered with our chief _priestess_ ever received a favourable answer from our god; storms and thunder greeted every votary that entered the temple without her protection; calms and sunshine those who obtained it.” The most farcical thing about it was that the little domestic tyrant took all this homage as his due, and to hear him talk his courtiers might think that he was as despotic as the Cæsars and as autocratic as the Tsar. On one occasion his mind ran back over English history (with which, by the way, he was imperfectly acquainted), and he recalled his predecessors on the throne and contrasted them unfavourably with himself. To quote the same authority: “Charles I.,” he said, “was governed by his wife; Charles II. by his mistresses; James II. by his priests; William III. by his men; and Queen Anne by her women-favourites. His father, he added, had been by anyone that could get at him. And at the end of this compendious history of our great and wise monarchs, with a significant, satisfied, triumphant air, he turned about smiling to one of his auditors, and asked him--‘And who do they say governs now?’”