Unmoved as Caroline appeared at this degrading scene, she felt it acutely; but she did not wish that others should be aware of her feelings under such a visitation. Lord Hervey was aware of this; and when, on the following morning, she remarked that he had looked at her the evening before as if he thought she had been going to cry, the courtier protested that he had neither done the one nor thought the other, but had expressly directed his eyes on another object, lest if they met hers, the comicality of the scene should have set both of them laughing. And such scenes were of constant occurrence. The King extracted something unpleasant from his very pleasures, just as acids may be produced from sugar. Sometimes he fell into a difficulty during the process. Thus, on one occasion, when the party were again assembled for their usual delightful evening, the Queen had mentioned the name of a person whose father, she said, was known to the King. It was at the time when his Majesty was most bitterly incensed against his eldest son. Caroline was on better terms with Frederick; but, as she remarked, they each knew the other too well to love or trust one another. Well, the King hearing father and son alluded to, observed, that ‘one very often sees fathers and sons very little alike; a wise father has very often a fool for his son. One sees a father a very brave man, and his son a scoundrel; a father very honest, and his son a great knave; a father a man of truth, and his son a great liar; in short, a father that has all sorts of good qualities, and a son who is good for nothing.’[23] The Queen and all present betrayed, by their countenances, that they comprehended the historical parallel; whereupon the King attempted, as he thought, to make it less flagrantly applicable, by running the comparison in another sense. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘the case was just the reverse, and that very disagreeable fathers had very agreeable men for their sons.’ In this case, the King, as Lord Hervey suggests, was thinking of his own father, as in the former one he had been thinking of his son. But how he drew what was sour from the sweetest of his pleasures is shown from his remarks after having been to the theatre to see Shakspeare’s ‘Henry IV.’ He was tolerably well pleased with all the actors, save the ‘Prince of Wales.’ He had never seen, he said, so awkward a fellow and so mean a looking scoundrel in his life. Everybody, says Lord Hervey, who hated the actual Prince of Wales thought of him as the King here expressed himself of the player; ‘but all very properly pretended to understand his Majesty literally, joined in the censure, and abused the theatrical Prince of Wales for a quarter of an hour together.’