is
public offices. But George seems to have had a profound and a very
well-justified distrust of Marlborough. Though he honored him with marks
of respect and attention, though he restored him to the great position he
had held in the State, yet the King never allowed Marlborough to suppose
that he really had regained his former influence in court and political
life. Marlborough was shelved, and he already knew it, and bitterly
complained of it.

{55}

CHAPTER IV.

THE KING COMES.

[Sidenote: 1714--Hanover]

"The old town of Hanover," says Thackeray, "must look still pretty much
as in the time when George Louis left it. The gardens and pavilions of
Herrenhausen are scarce changed since the day when the stout old
Electress Sophia fell down in her last walk there, preceding but by a
few weeks to the tomb James the Second's daughter, whose death made way
for the Brunswick Stuarts in England. . . . You may see at
Herrenhausen the very rustic theatre in which the Platens danced and
performed masks and sang before the Elector and his sons. There are
the very fauns and dryads of stone still glimmering through the
brandies, still grinning and piping their ditties of no tone, as in the
days when painted nymphs hung garlands round them, appeared under their
leafy arcades with gilt crooks, guiding rams with gilt horns, descended
from 'machines' in the guise of Diana or Minerva, and delivered immense
allegorical compliments to the princes returned home from the
campaign." Herrenhausen, indeed, is changed but little since those
days of which Thackeray speaks. But although not many years have
passed since Thackeray went to visit Hanover before delivering his
lectures on "The Four Georges," Hanover itself has undergone much
alteration. If one of the Georges could now return to his ancestral
capital he would indeed be bewildered at the great new squares, the
rows of tall vast shops and warehouses, the spacious railway-station,
penetrated to every corner at night by the keen electric light. But in
passing from Hanover to Herrenhausen one goes back, in a short drive,
from the {56} days of the Emperor William of Germany to the days of
George the Elector. Herrenhausen, the favorite residence of the
Electors of Hanover, is but a short distance from the capital.
Thackeray speaks of it as an ugly place, and it certainly has not many
claims to the picturesque. But it is full of a certain curious
half-melancholy interest