the devastating power and superior force of the late Emperor of the French, had inspired them with sentiments of a noble and generous pride. To this court, also, numerous foreigners of distinction were known to resort; hence it became the almost constant scene of festivity and pleasure—the rallying point of gaiety and fashion.

This general intercourse with many of the most fascinating and intelligent persons of all the surrounding nations, had a natural tendency to remove, in a great degree, the sedate and sombre character of those Germans who were the constant witnesses and partakers of the amusements and festivities for which the ducal court of Brunswick was supereminently conspicuous.

In such a school as this it was natural that a mind, already buoyant and elastic; and a heart, whose original and native character was that of frankness and unreservedness, should be moulded into forms not easily changed, when, in after-life, they should come to be exposed to the broad gaze of the world, and should come, also, under the review and scrutinizing eye of persons in other countries, and born under other auspices; whose real or affected notions of what they call propriety and decorum, lead them to condemn whatever they do not understand, and to treat with disdain whatever they are incapable of appreciating.

But we will proceed to give some further account of the immediate relatives of her Majesty, and of their history prior to her first coming to England,

Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Bruns

wick Wolfenbuttle, already mentioned, had issue, by his Princess Augusta, first, Charlotte Georgiana Augusta, born December the 3d, 1764, and married October the 11th, 1780, to Frederick William, Prince of Wirtemburg-Stutgard, afterwards Duke of Wirtemburg-Stutgard, to whom she bore two sons and a daughter. After her decease, the duke married his second wife, Charlotte, Princess-royal of Great Britain, now Queen of Wirtemburg; Bonaparte having raised the dukedom to a kingdom.

Second: CAROLINE AMELIA ELIZABETH, now Queen-consort of King George IV. born May the 17th, 1768.

Third: George William Christian, born June the 27th, 1769.

Fourth William Frederick, born October the 9th, 1771.

Fifth Charles George Augustus, Duke of Brunswick Wolfenbuttle, born February the 8th, 1776, married October the 14th, 1790, to the Princess Frederica Louisa Wilhelmina, daughter of William V. Stadtholder; and

Sixth Leopold, of whose melancholy death, the Leyden Gazette of 1785, gives the following particulars :

"We have, within these few days, experienced the greatest calamities, by the overflowing of the Oder, which burst its banks in several places, and carried away houses, bridges, and every thing that opposed its course. Numbers of people lost their lives in this rapid inundation; but of all the acci

dents arising from it, none was so generally lamented as the death of the good Prince Leopold of Brunswick. This amiable personage, standing at the side of the river, a woman threw herself at his feet, beseeching him to give orders for some persons to go to the rescue of her children, whom! bewildered by the sudden danger, she had left behind her in the house. Some soldiers who were also in the same place were crying for help.

The Prince endeavoured to procure a flat-bottomed boat, but no one could be found to venture across the river, even though the Prince offered large sums of money, and promised to share the danger. At last, moved by the cries of the unfortunate inhabitants of the suburb, and led by the sentiments of his own benevolent heart, he took the resolution of going to their assistance himself. Those who were about him endeavoured to dissuade him from this hazardous enterprise; but, touched to the soul by the distress of the miserable people, he replied in the following words: "What am I more than either you or they? I am a man, like yourselves, and nothing ought to be attended to here but the voice of humanity."

Unshaken, therefore, in his resolution, he immediately embarked, with three watermen, in a small boat, and crossed the river. The boat did not want three lengths of the bank, when it struck against a tree, and in an instant, they all, together with the boat, disappeared. A few minutes after the Prince rose again, and supported

himself a short time by taking hold of a tree; but the violence of the current soon bore him down, and he never appeared more.

The boatmen, more fortunate, were every one saved, and the Prince alone became the victim of his own humanity. The whole city was in affliction for the loss of this truly amiable Prince, whose humility, gentleness of manners, and compassionate disposition, endeared him to all ranks. He lived, indeed, as he died, in the highest exercise of humanity. Had not the current been so rapid, he would, no doubt, have been saved, as he was a remarkably good swimmer."

Prince Charles Ferdinand was a man of undoubted military skill, and of great personal bravery. His life was checquered by varying scenes of great prosperity and comparative adversity. He inherited most of the virtues of his ancestors. He received his military education under his uncle, Prince Ferdinand, styled, during the lifetime of his father, the hereditary Prince of Brunswick Wolfenbuttle.

In the reign of George II. Prince Ferdinand was appointed to the command of the British army during the celebrated seven years' war, when Prince Charles commanded the troops of his own country, which at that time formed a portion of the allied army. But as it is foreign to the direct objects of this work to enter very minutely into the military transactions of those days, I shall limit this part of the subject to a very small

compass, only briefly noticing a few of the most important transactions in which the father of her present Majesty, Queen Caroline, took a prominent part, and which ultimately led to his residence amongst us in London.

This Prince succeeded his father in the dukedom of Brunswick in the year 1780, and, about six years afterwards, he entered Holland at the head of a Prussian army; when he re-established the Prince of Orange in the statdholdership.

In 1792, at the commencement of the French Revolution, he was appointed commander in chief of the combined armies of Austria and Prussia, on which occasion the flaming manifesto against the French nation, in which his Royal Highness threatened them with little short of total annihilation, unless they would return to a proper sense of their situation, and would cease to manifest a disposition to levy war against every crowned head in Europe.

His Highness, however, as might have been expected, failed in his plans, and his army was shortly reduced to a most wretched and deplorable condition. His military talents, nevertheless, were often eminently displayed; and numerous were the occasions in which he very greatly signalized himself.

In the latter end of the year 1806, however, commenced a series of defeats and mortifications which he lived but a short time to witness. In the year 1794, he had resigned his situation in the army to Field-marshal Mollendorff; but during