And after the romantic times of that unfortunate family come the stolid annals of Dutch William, Anne, and the unimaginative Georges--a line of sovereigns for whom enthusiasm was impossible. Mean in their vices and contemptible in their virtues, they lived their lives and reigned over England, and posted along the Dover Road on their way to or from beloved Hanover; and no man's heart beat the faster for their coming, and none sorrowed overmuch for their going. All the Georges, and William the Fourth, too, were here, I believe, and in their train came the lean Keilmanseggs, the fleshly Schwellenbergs, and a variety of greasy Germans, fresh from the terrible voyage over sea; but no one cares in the least either where they went or whither they did not go. [Sidenote: OLD-TIME TRAVELLERS] But they all travelled with what we must now consider a snail's pace. The wealthiest, the most powerful, could go no faster than horses managed to drag them. When Sir Robert Peel was summoned in haste from Rome by William the Fourth to form a Ministry in 1834, he travelled full speed to London, and the journey took him just within a fortnight. He noted in his journal that he accomplished it in exactly the same time as the Emperor Hadrian had done seventeen hundred years before him. The means of travel at the disposal of both statesmen were identical--post horses. Another Royal visitor (of a much later date indeed) discovered the "chops of the Channel" to be no respectors of personages. In fact, His Serene Highness Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who was come across the water to wed his Cousin, Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Ireland ("Empress of India" was yet in the loom of the future), found his serenity as much disturbed by the roughness of his passage as falls to the lot of most bad sailors, of whatever social stratum. He was, in short, very ill, and unable to proceed any farther that day. On the morrow, Friday, February 7, 1840, he resumed his journey to London, by road, of course, for the railways that serve Dover (and serve it badly, too!) had not as yet been built. Starting about midday, the father of our future kings reached Canterbury at two o'clock. The inevitable Address was, it is surely scarcely necessary to add, immediately forthcoming, to which the Prince as inevitably "replied graciously"; afterwards attending service in the Cathedral, where, as he could have understood but little of the service, he must have been supremely bored. The Cathedral was thronged with crowds who came not so much in order to pray as to peep at the Princeling whom the young Queen had delighted to honour.