No monarch is more intimately associated with Windsor than George III., who loved the place which had been cordially disliked and neglected by his two predecessors. So complete had been the neglect, that the castle was quite unfit for habitation, obliging the Royal Family, during the process of repairs, to live in an ugly stuccoed building known as the Queen's Lodge, built on the site of the present royal stables. Owing to the minute chronicle of their daily events in the diary of Fanny Burney, we know exactly what the good commonplace King and Queen did and said during their residence at Windsor. So much had Queen Charlotte admired "Evelina," that she thought no greater honour could be done to the gifted authoress than to make her a dresser to her royal self, a condescension which almost overwhelmed shy Fanny Burney, who accepted the post, little dreaming of the drudgery it entailed. Everything went by routine in the Court life: the same things were done every day at precisely the same time they were done the day before, with a monotony which Thackeray declares must have rendered the life, frugal and virtuous as it was, stupid to a degree which he shuddered to contemplate. Poor King George spent the last ten years of his life, hopelessly insane and quite blind, confined in rooms overlooking the North Terrace, and was buried in the new tomb-house which he had cut in the solid chalk, under what is now known as the Albert Memorial Chapel. George IV. carried on the repairs commenced by his father, living meanwhile in a lodge in the park. Over a million pounds was spent upon the alterations and furnishing of the royal apartments. When Sir Jeffry Wyattville, the architect to whom the work had been entrusted, had completed his task, Windsor Castle appeared exactly as it does to-day. The walls and towers had been repaired and refaced, the brick buildings within the walls had been cleared away, the Round Tower raised by forty feet so that it dominated the whole pile, and the present State apartments built on the south and eastern sides of the Upper Ward. Though Windsor Castle cannot claim so fascinating or romantic a history as that of other royal palaces, yet it can boast that while its more picturesque rivals have either vanished or ceased their careers as palaces, it alone remains a royal residence with a story stretching back to the Normans. Majestic in its calm serenity, it remains, as Leigh Hunt used to say, "a place to receive monarchs in." CHAPTER III THE TOWER OF LONDON