there in the eighteenth century, with all its coarseness, which, in spite of the early Hanoverian hatred of everything English, has an air strongly national about it.
"Hanover," says Lord Hervey in one of his bitterest passages about George II., "had so completed the conquest of his affections, that there was nothing English ever commended in his presence that he did not always show, or pretend to show, was surpassed by something of the same kind in Germany. No English, or even French cook, could dress a dinner; no English confectioner set out a dessert; no English player could act; no English coachman could drive, or English jockey ride; nor were any English horses fit to be drove or fit to be ridden; no Englishman knew how to come into a room, nor any Englishwoman how to dress herself; nor were there any diversions in England, public or private; nor any man or woman in England whose conversation was to be borne—the one, as he said, talking of nothing but their dull politics, and the others of nothing but their ugly clothes. Whereas at Hanover all these things were in their utmost perfection."[1]
Yet King George might storm as he would, Hampton Court, even in his time, was a thoroughly English house. The pictures, the furniture, the house and grounds, were, in the most obvious manner, those of an English King, not a German Elector. Space, and light, and decoration—thoroughly
- ↑ Memoirs, vol.ii. p. 29.
