Lord Hervey, very gallantly and courtier-like, expressed his wish that her Majesty could have been in the house to let the senate know her wisdom; or that she could have been concealed there, to have had the opportunity of saying, with Agrippine-- Derrière une voile, invisible, et présente, Je fus de ce grand corps l’âme toute puissante. The quotation, perhaps, could not have been altogether applicable, but as Lord Hervey quoted it, and ‘my lord’ was a man of wit, it is doubtless as well-placed as wit could make it. The Queen, at all events, took it as a compliment, laughed, and declared, that often when she was with these impatient fellows, ever ready with their unreasonable remonstrances, she was tempted herself to say, with Agrippine, that she was-- Fille, femme, et mère de vos maîtres; a quotation less applicable even than the former, but in which Lord Hervey detected such abundance of wit that he went into a sort of ecstasy of delight at the Queen’s judgment, humour, knowledge, and ability. When the Excise bill was for the first time brought before the house, the debate lasted till one in the morning. Lord Hervey, during the evening, wrote an account of its progress to the King and Queen; and when he repaired to the palace at the conclusion of the discussion, the King kept him in the Queen’s bed-chamber, talking over the scene, till three o’clock in the morning, and never for a moment remembered that the hungry intelligencer had not dined since the yesterday. When the clamour against the bill rose to such a pitch that all England, the army included, seemed ready to rise against it, Walpole offered himself as a personal sacrifice, if the service and interests of the King would be promoted by his surrender of office and power. It is again illustrative of the influence of Caroline that this offer was made to her and not to the King. He was in truth the Queen’s minister; and nobly she stood by him. When Walpole made the offer in question, Caroline declared that she would not be so mean, so cowardly, or so ungrateful as to abandon him; and she infused the same spirit into the King. The latter had intended, from the first, to reign and govern, and be effectively his own minister; but Caroline so wrought upon him that he thought he had of himself reached the conviction that it was necessary for him to trust in a minister, and that Walpole was the fittest man for such an office. And so he grew to love the very man whom he had been wont to hold in his heart’s extremest hate. He would even occasionally speak of him as a ‘noble fellow,’ and, with tears in his eyes, would listen to an account of some courageous stand Walpole had made in the house against the enemies of the government, and he would add the while a running commentary of sobs.