Her thoughtlessness was on a par with her sensibility; and it is said that a very early seclusion from court, to which she was condemned by parental command, was caused by a double want of discretion. She was too fond, it was reported, of relieving young peasants in distress, and of listening to young aides-de-camp who affected to be miserable. She was taught that princesses were never their own almoners, and that it did not become them to converse with officers of low degree. On her return to court, an aged lady, whose years were warrant for her boldness, recommended an exercise, in future, of more judgment than had marked the past. ‘Gone is gone and will never return,’ was the remark of the pretty, sententious, young lady; ‘and what is to come will come of itself.’ It was the remark of a girl brought up like that very Polly Honeycomb whose story Colman wrote and Miss Burney read to Queen Charlotte. Like that heroine, the Princess Caroline had not the wisest of parents. Like her, she was addicted to romance, and was too ready to put in practice all that romances teach, and to enter into correspondence at once pleasant and dangerous. Again and again was forced seclusion adopted as the parental remedy to cure a wayward daughter of too much warmth of heart and too little gravity of head. Her heart, however, would not beat warmly at the bidding of every new suitor. An offer was made to her, when very young, by a scion of the house of Mecklenburgh, whose offer was supported by both the parents of Caroline. That Princess ridiculed her lover, and flatly refused the honour presented for her acceptance. She similarly declined the offers of the Prince of Orange and the Prince George of Darmstadt. Her father was now reigning Duke of Brunswick, burning with desire to destroy the French Republic, and eager to obtain a consort for his daughter. He cannot be said to have succeeded much more happily in the latter than in the former. As for this daughter, she would herself have been happier, in those days when her education--or no education--was scrambled through, had she possessed any religious principles. But she was like other German princesses, who, as it was not known into what royal families they might have the good-luck to marry--Russo-Greek, Roman Catholic, or Protestant--were taught morality (and that but indifferently) in place of faith and a reason for holding it. One consequence was, that they deferred believing anything convincedly until they were espoused--and then they joined their husband’s church, and remained precisely what they were before.