alled "Countess of Darlington" in this country--with excellent pension,
as was natural. They all had pensions: even Queen Sophie Dorothee, I
have noticed in our State-Paper Office, has her small pension, "800
pounds a year on the Irish Establishment:" Irish Establishment will
never miss such a pittance for our poor Child, and it may be useful
over yonder!--This Kielmannsegge, Countess of Darlington was, and is,
believed by the gossiping English to have been a second simultaneous
Mistress of his Majesty's; but seems, after all, to have been his
Half-Sister and nothing more. Half-Sister (due to Gentleman Ernst and
a Countess Platen of bad Hanover fame); grown dreadfully fat; but not
without shrewdness, perhaps affection; and worth something in this dull
foreign country, mere cataract of animal oils as she has become. These
Two are the amount of his Britannic Majesty's resources in that matter;
resources surely not extensive, after all!--

His Britannic Majesty's day, in St. James's, is not of an interesting
sort to him; and every evening he comes precisely at a certain hour to
drink beer, seasoned with a little tobacco, and the company of these two
women. Drinks diligently in a sipping way, says Horace; and smokes,
with such dull speech as there may be,--not till he is drunk, but only
perceptibly drunkish; raised into a kind of cloudy narcotic Olympus,
and opaquely superior to the ills of life; in which state he walks
uncomplainingly to bed. Government, when it can by any art be avoided,
he rarely meddles with; shows a rugged sagacity, where he does and must
meddle: consigns it to Walpole in dog-latin,--laughs at his "MENTIRIS."
This is the First George; first triumph of the Constitutional Principle,
which has since gone to such sublime heights among us,--heights which we
at last begin to suspect might be depths, leading down, all men now ask:
Whitherwards? A much-admired invention in its time, that of letting
go the rudder, or setting a wooden figure expensively dressed to take
charge of it, and discerning that the ship would sail of itself so much
more easily! Which it will, if a peculiarly good seaboat, in certain
kinds of sea,--for a time. Till the Sinbad "Magnetic Mountains" begin to
be felt pulling, or the circles of Charybdis get you in their sweep; and
then what an invention it was!--This, we say, is the new Sovereign Man,
whom the English People, being in some perplexity about the Pope and
other points, have calle