In spite of the King’s increased ill-temper towards the Queen, and in spite of what Sir Robert Walpole thought and said upon that delicate subject, Lord Hervey maintains that at this very time the King’s heart, as affected towards the Queen, was not less warm than his temper. The facts which are detailed by the gentle official immediately after he has made this assertion go strongly to disprove the latter. The detail involves a rather long extract; but its interest, and the elaborate minuteness with which this picture of a royal interior is painted, will doubtless be considered ample excuse for reproducing the passages. Lord Hervey was eye and ear-witness of what he here so well describes:-- ‘About nine o’clock every night the King used to return to the Queen’s apartment from that of his daughter’s, where, from the time of Lady Suffolk’s disgrace, he used to pass those evenings he did not go to the opera or play at quadrille, constraining them, tiring himself, and talking a little indecently to Lady Deloraine, who was always of the party. ‘At his return to the Queen’s side, the Queen used often to send for Lord Hervey to entertain them till they retired, which was generally at eleven. One evening among the rest, as soon as Lord Hervey came into the room, the Queen, who was knotting, while the King walked backwards and forwards, began jocosely to attack Lord Hervey upon an answer just published to a book of his friend Bishop Hoadly’s on the Sacrament, in which the bishop was very ill-treated; but before she had uttered half what she had a mind to say, the King interrupted her, and told her she always loved talking of such nonsense, and things she knew nothing of; adding, that if it were not for such foolish people loving to talk of these things when they were written, the fools who wrote upon them would never think of publishing their nonsense, and disturbing the government with impertinent disputes that nobody of any sense ever troubled himself about. The Queen bowed, and said, “Sir, I only did it to let Lord Hervey know that his friend’s book had not met with that general approbation he had pretended.” “A pretty fellow for a friend!” said the King, turning to Lord Hervey. “Pray what is it that charms you in him? His pretty limping gait?” And then he acted the bishop’s lameness, and entered upon some unpleasant defects which it is not necessary to repeat. The stomachs of the listeners must have been strong, if they experienced no qualm at the too graphic and nasty detail. “Or is it,” continued the King, “his great honesty that charms your lordship? His asking a thing of me for one man, and when he came to have it in his own power to bestow, refusing the Queen to give it to the very man for whom he had asked it? Or do you admire his conscience, that makes him now put out a book that, till he was Bishop of Winchester, for fear his conscience might hurt his preferment, he kept locked up in his chest? Is his conscience so much improved beyond