Nightingale.—­The Essence of Small Talk.—­Hervey’s Affectation
      and Effeminacy.—­Pope’s Quarrel with Hervey and Lady
      Mary.—­Hervey’s Duel with Pulteney.—­’The Death of Lord Hervey: 
      a Drama.’—­Queen Caroline’s last Drawing-room.—­Her Illness and
      Agony.—­A Painful Scene.—­The Truth discovered.—­The Queen’s
      Dying Bequests.—­The King’s Temper.—­Archbishop Potter is sent
      for.—­The Duty of Reconciliation.—­The Death of Queen
      Caroline.—­A Change in Hervey’s Life.—­Lord Hervey’s
      Death.—­Want of Christianity.—­Memoirs of his Own Time.

The village of Kensington was disturbed in its sweet repose one day, more than a century ago, by the rumbling of a ponderous coach and six, with four outriders and two equerries kicking up the dust; whilst a small body of heavy dragoons rode solemnly after the huge vehicle.  It waded, with inglorious struggles, through a deep mire of mud, between the Palace and Hyde Park, until the cortege entered Kensington Park, as the gardens were then called, and began to track the old road that led to the red-brick structure to which William III. had added a higher story, built by Wren.  There are two roads by which coaches could approach the house:  ‘one,’ as the famous John, Lord Hervey, wrote to his mother, ’so convex, the other so concave, that, by this extreme of faults, they agree in the common one of being, like the high road, impassable.’  The rumbling coach, with its plethoric steeds, toils slowly on, and reaches the dismal pile, of which no association is so precious as that of its having been the birthplace of our loved Victoria Regina.  All around, as the emblazoned carriage impressively veers round into the grand entrance, savours of William and Mary, of Anne, of Bishop Burnet and Harley, Atterbury and Bolingbroke.  But those were pleasant days compared to those of the second George, whose return from Hanover in this mountain of a coach is now described.

The panting steeds are gracefully curbed by the state coachman in his scarlet livery, with his cocked-hat and gray wig underneath it:  now the horses are foaming and reeking as if they had come from the world’s end to Kensington, and yet they have only been to meet King George on his entrance into London, which he has reached from Helvoetsluys, on his way from Hanover, in time, as he expects, to spend his birthday among his English subjects.

It is Sunday, and repose renders the retirement of Kensington and its avenues and shades more sombre than ever.  Suburban retirement is usually so.  It is noon; and the inmates of Kensington Palace are just coming forth from the chapel in the palace.  The coach is now stopping, and the equerries are at hand to offer their respectful assistance to the diminutive figure that, in full Field-marshal regimentals, a cocked-hat stuck crosswise on his head, a sword dangling even down to his heels, ungraciously heeds them not, but