Caroline shared the vices in which her husband indulged, by favouring the indulgence. She was not the more excusable for this because Archdeacon Blackburn and other churchmen praised her for encouraging the King in his wickedness. Her ground of action was not founded on virtuous principle. She sanctioned, nay promoted, the vicious way of life followed by her consort merely that she might exercise more power politically and personally. She depreciated her own worth and attractions in order to heighten those of the favourites whom the King most affected, and by way of apologising for his being attracted from her to them. Actually, she had as little regard for married faith as the King himself. The Queen regarded his doings with such complacency as to give rise to a belief that she had never cared for the King, and was therefore jealouslessly indifferent as to the disgraceful tenor of his life. An allusion was once made in her presence, when the Duke of Grafton was by, to her having in former times not been unaffected by the suit of a German prince. ‘G--d, madam,’ said the duke, in the fashionable blasphemous style of the period, ‘I should like to see the man you could love!’ ‘See him?’ said the Queen, laughingly; ‘do you not then think that I love the King?’ ‘G--d, madam,’ exclaimed the ostentatious blasphemer, ‘I only wish I were King of France, and I would soon be sure whether you did or did not.’ Caroline has been laughed at for her patronage of such a poet as Duck. She had wit enough to see the merit of Gay. On her accession she offered him the honourable post of gentleman-usher to the Princess Louisa--a sinecure worth 200_l_. a-year, and a stepping-stone to other preferment; Gay peremptorily and scornfully declined the offer. Accordingly, Cibber was preferred to Gay for the post of laureate. Caroline had always been kind to this ‘tetchy’ poet. In 1724, when Gay’s play, ‘The Captives,’ had failed on the stage, she invited him to read it at Leicester House. On being ushered into the august company, Gay, nervous from long waiting, tragedy in hand, bashful and blundering, fell over a stool, thereby threw down a screen, and set his illustrious audience in a comical sort of confusion, amid which the kind-hearted princess did her best to put Gay at ease in his perplexities.