Domestic griefs could not depress the Queen’s wit. An illustration of this is afforded by her remark on the _Triple Alliance_. ‘It always put her in mind,’ she said, ‘of the _South Sea_ scheme, which the parties concerned entered into, not without knowing the cheat, but hoping to make advantage of it, everybody designing, when he had made his own fortune, to be the first in scrambling out of it, and each thinking himself wise enough to be able to leave his fellow-adventurers in the lurch.’ It has been well observed that the King’s good humour was now as insulting to her Majesty as his bad. When he was in the former rare vein, he exhibited it by entertaining the Queen with accounts of her rival, and the many pleasures which he and that lady had enjoyed together. He appears at Hanover to have been as extravagant in the entertainments which he gave as his grandfather, Ernest Augustus. Some of these court revels he caused to be painted on canvas; the ladies represented therein were all portraits of the actual revellers. Several of such pictures were brought over to England, and five of them were hung up in the Queen’s dressing-room. Occasionally, of an evening, the King would take a candle from the Queen’s table, and go from picture to picture, with Lord Hervey, telling him its history, explaining the joyous incidents, naming the persons represented, and detailing all that had been said or done on the particular occasion before them. ‘During which lecture,’ says the vice-chamberlain himself, ‘Lord Hervey, while peeping over his Majesty’s shoulders at those pictures, was shrugging up his own, and now and then stealing a look, to make faces at the Queen, who, a little angry, a little peevish, and a little tired at her husband’s absurdity, and a little entertained with his lordship’s grimaces, used to sit and knot in a corner of the room, sometimes yawning, and sometimes smiling, and equally afraid of betraying those signs, either of her lassitude or mirth.’