Queen Anne, on the death of Prince George of Denmark, wore black and white, with a mixture of purple in some part of her dress. The precedent was taken from that worn by Mary Queen of Scots for the Earl of Darnley. Mourning, with such variety in it, was, after all, better than _none_. The Pope’s nieces, for instance, never wear mourning, not even for their nearest relatives. The Romans account it so great a happiness for a family to have a Pope in it, that they think no calamity whatever ought to be permitted to afflict his Holiness’s kindred! On the other hand, the dowager Empresses of Germany were accustomed never to leave off their mourning, and even their apartments were hung with black till their death. I will just add, that the French Queens, previous to the era of Charles VIII., wore white upon the decease of the King. They were thence called “Reines blanches.” In later days, the state mourning of the French court was purple. Consequently, when Anne wore white, black, and purple, in mourning for her departed lord, she put on the suits of woe sanctioned by the practice of three different courts. Sophia Dorothea, the wife of George I., was the second of the royal consorts of England who never visited our shores. For allowing Count Königsmark to kiss her hand, her jealous husband murdered the Count, and shut the lady up in prison for more than thirty years. In her youth she was a charming person, charmingly dressed. The most touching circumstance of her long captivity was her weekly appearance, all clad in white, at the communion-table of the chapel of her prison-house, the Castle of Alden, where she partook of the sacrament, made solemn asseveration of her innocence, and forgave her enemies. The process of dressing Marie Antoinette, it will be seen in another page, was at times a splendid misery. That of Queen Caroline, the wife of George II., was a splendid mockery. Horace Walpole describes a scene as having taken place in Queen Anne’s tiring-room, which really occurred in that of the sovereign lady of the second George. This exemplary Queen dressed and transacted her early worship at one and the same moment. She and her nymphs were in one room, the chaplain _solus_ in another. Occasionally these nymphs, in their discretion, closed the door. Whenever this occurred, the chaplain, liberal Whiston, ceased to pray, and meditated on the mysteries proceeding within. This observance nettled the Queen, and did not please her ladies. One of the latter, on re-opening the door one morning, and finding the chaplain had not progressed in his duties while he had been shut out, angrily inquired, “Why did you stop?” “I stopped,” said Whiston, “because I do not choose to whistle the word of God through the key-hole.”