The Duchess affected to treat the marriage of her daughter with the Prince of Wales as perfectly unexpected by her, but as she added that ‘she never could give the idea to Caroline’ we may fairly suppose that the thought of such a thing being possible had really entered for a moment into her own mind. George III., however, had been accustomed to speak disapprovingly of the marriage of cousins-german, and with good reason. It is only to be regretted that he did not act in accordance with his own expressed opinions on this point. It may be noted as a strange fact that the prelate who performed the marriage ceremony which made of the two cousins, so closely akin by blood, man and wife, would have been very much shocked had he been asked to do the same office for a man about to marry the sister of his deceased wife, and with whom he had not the slightest blood relationship. The Duchess, as has already been remarked, spoke of her brother, George III., as having more amiability than intellect. If amiability mean the power of loving others, she very much qualified the remark by observing that ‘he loved her very much, _as well as he could love anybody_;’ an equivocal phrase, which is made clear enough by the context; for the Duchess added, that her long absence, and his thirty years of intercourse with Queen Charlotte, had caused him to forget the sister whom he loved as much as he could love anybody. The court of this Duchess, who had been so anxious to make of virtue a fixed possession for her daughter, was not a court where virtue itself was a fixed resident. The mistress of the Duke was quite as important a lady there as the Duchess; and yet the lady herself, or one of those who held the post which was shared by many, had the sense to be a trifle ashamed of her position. Her name was Hertzfeldt. She had ennobled the name by putting a _de_ before it, but she had not dared upon the prefix of the Teutonic _von_. Lord Malmesbury thus notices her. ‘In the evening with Mademoiselle de Hertzfeldt--old Berlin acquaintance, Duke’s mistress--much altered, but still clear and agreeable; full of lamentations and fears; her apartments elegantly furnished, and she herself with all the _appareil_ of her situation; she was at first rather ashamed to see me, but she soon got over it.’