Hanover is still in some respects the same as it was in the time of Ernest Augustus and Sophia. Until the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign, it must have been almost exactly the same; but the divorce from the English crown which then ensued made a difference, and the expulsion of the King of Hanover, in 1866, brought the town under Prussian rule, and resulted in the abolition of many landmarks. Under the iron heel of Prussia, Hanover is losing many of its distinctive features. It has become much like any other modern Prussian city, with wide streets, huge barracks, and enormous and hideous buildings, vast manufactories and breweries. The town has advanced in prosperity, but has lost in picturesqueness. ----- At the court of Celle there was a comparatively modest retinue, few festivities, and little pomp of state. Hanover, modelled on Versailles, maintained a court out of all proportion to the importance of the duchy. The Duchess Sophia, who was a strict upholder of dignity, established in it rigid rules of place and precedence, and no herald’s table was ever classed more strictly than the different orders of the court of Hanover. First and foremost, there was the ducal family—the sacred clan, above, apart, and beyond all meaner mortals. In the second class came the Field-Marshal of the army, all alone, a sort of buffer between their Serene Highnesses and their subjects. Then followed in the third class, in order meet, the civil and military authorities, the privy councillors and ministers, and generals of the army. The fourth class was made up of the High Chamberlain and the marshals of the court, and so down to the pages, all of whom were noble. After this class there was a great gulf—the gulf between noble and simple; and then came in array a number of lesser court officials, gentlemen ushers, physicians, musicians, every one in nicely graduated order, even down to the cooks and footmen, coachmen and grooms. The stables at Hanover were always a feature; they are so to-day, and must have been well worth seeing in Sophie Dorothea’s time. They contained some six hundred horses and a great number of splendid equipages. Sophie Dorothea held a high place in all this state, and as Princess of Hanover (as she was formally styled) she was given a separate household. Her apartments were in a wing of the old palace; but she had her own establishment, her chamberlain, her ladies-in-waiting, and her pages. She seldom drove out except in an enormous gilt coach, with postillions and running footmen. We may picture her rumbling through the narrow streets of old Hanover of an afternoon, her pretty, childish, wistful face looking out of the window of the great coach, or driving outside the walls to pay her respects to her haughty mother-in-law at Herrenhausen.