no appeal of honour or
mercy could check in his selfish pursuit of pleasure.

"I look through all his life," Thackeray says, "and recognise but a bow
and a grin. I try and take him to pieces, and find silk stockings,
padding, stays, a coat with frogs and a fur collar, a star and blue
ribbon, a pocket handkerchief prodigiously scented, one of Truefitt's
best nutty brown wigs reeking with oil, a set of teeth and a huge black
stock, under-waistcoats, more under-waistcoats, and then--nothing.
French ballet-dancers, French cooks, horse-jockeys, buffoons,
procuresses, tailors, boxers, fencing-masters, china, jewel and
gimcrack-merchants--these were his real companions."

Such was the husband Princess Caroline came so light-heartedly, with
laughter on her lips, from Brunswick to wed, little dreaming of the
disillusion and tears that were to await her on the very threshold of
the life to which she had looked forward with such high hopes.

We get the first glimpse of Caroline some twelve years earlier, when Sir
John Stanley, who was making the grand tour, spent a few weeks at her
father's Court. He speaks of her as a "beautiful girl of fourteen," and
adds, "I did think and dream of her day and night at Brunswick, and for
a year afterwards I saw her for hours three or fours times a week, but
as a star out of my reach." Years later he met her again under sadly
changed conditions. "One day only," he writes, "when dining with her and
her mother at Blackheath, she smiled at something which had pleased her,
and for an instant only I could have fancied she had been the Caroline
of fourteen years old--the lovely, pretty Caroline, the girl my eyes had
so often rested on, with light and powdered hair hanging in curls on her
neck, the lips from which only sweet words seemed as if they would flow,
with looks animated, and always simply and modestly dressed."

Lady Charlotte Campbell, too, gives us a glimpse of her in these early
and happier years, before sorrow had laid its defacing hand on her. "The
Princess was in her early youth a pretty girl," Lady Charlotte says,
"with fine light hair--very delicately formed features, and a fine
complexion--quick, glancing, penetrating eyes, long cut and rather small
in the head, which gave them much expression; and a remarkably
delicately formed mouth."

It was in no happy home that the Princess had been cradled one May day
in 1768. Her father, Charles William, Duke of Brunswick, was an austere
s