this time a fine girl, somewhat given to romping, but with the power of assuming a fine air of dignity when occasion required. At the pleasant dinners at Kensington, when the servants were out of the room, and a dumb waiter (all the better, as Sir Sidney Smith used to say, for being a deaf waiter also) was at the elbow of every guest, the Princess would seem to take delight in going over the history of the past. What little there was good in her, she once remarked to Count Munster, was owing to the count’s mother, who had been her governess. She acknowledged that the natural petulance of her character was rather active at the period of her marriage. ‘One of the civil things his Highness said just at first was to find fault with my shoes; and as I was very young and lively in those days, I told him to make me a better pair and send them to me. I brought letters from all the princes and princesses to him from all the petty courts, and I tossed them to him and said: “There ----, that’s to prove I’m not an impostor.”’ She married, she said, entirely to please her father, for whom she would have made any sacrifice. She regretted that the union was determined on before the parties had been introduced to each other. ‘Had I come over here as a Princess, with my father, on a visit, as Mr. Pitt once wanted my father to have done, things might have been very different; but what is done cannot be undone.’[12] Her own condition at home, however, was, at the time, but melancholy. She had there but a sorry life, between her father’s mistress and her own mother. Civility to the one always procured her a scolding from the other. No wonder that she was, as she asserted, ‘tired of it.’ Her spirit, depressed as it often was during her presence at Kensington, except on the few occasions when her daughter was permitted to see her, sometimes experienced the very liveliest of outbreaks. She thought nothing, for instance, of slipping through the gardens, with a single lady-in-waiting, both of them attired, perhaps, in evening costume, and, crossing Bayswater, stroll through the fields, and along by the Paddington Canal, at the great risk of being insulted, or followed by a mob, if recognised. She thought as little of entering houses that were to let, and inquiring about the terms. These are but small, yet they are significant, traits. One of more importance is her study and perception of character. At Kensington she kept a book, in which she wrote down, in indifferent English, but with great boldness and spirit, the characters of many of the leading persons in England. It is doubtful whether this book was destroyed, as the writer, when dying, ordered it to be. If it could be recovered, with the diary of Queen Charlotte and that kept by poor Sophia Dorothea, something from them might be culled of more interest than anything that is yet to be found in the histories of these three Queens.