This predilection would, independent of her injuries, be sufficient to account for the Duchess’s aversion to the very Princess whom, some years before, she had extolled as a model of excellence. The Queen, it might have been thought, would have possessed a hold over her good opinion, from the very nature of her education, which she received from the careful and judicious hands of the electress Sophia, the “nursing mother” of the Hanoverian interests. But nothing could mitigate the aversion and contempt of the Duchess towards the new school of Whiggism, which, to her penetrating view, but little resembled the disinterested spirit of Godolphin, or the unflinching adherence of her son-in-law Sunderland to what he termed patriotism. That word had now gone quite out of fashion, and it consisted with Sir Robert Walpole’s notions of perfect good-breeding, upon which it was his weakness to pique himself, to laugh generally at those high-minded sentiments which the Duchess, to her credit, ever professed, and the absence of which, however often they might be violated in the frailty of human nature, could not be compensated by the “pompous pleasantry”[386] with which Walpole satirised all that is good and great. The Duchess has left on record the workings of her powerful mind. With an intellect unenfeebled by age, whilst she described herself, in 1737, as a perfect cripple, who had very little enjoyment of life, and could not hold out long, she gave ample proof that her reasoning faculties were unimpaired, her discernment as acute as it had ever been; and that wonderful power, the result of both qualities, of seeing into the events of futurity as far as the concerns of this world are involved, had in her arrived at a degree of perfection which can scarcely be too much admired.