THE DUCHESS OF KENT.

21

The Duchess of Kent had been brought up under the immediate care and superintendence of her illustrious mother, whose character we have already described. She had shared the youthful lessons of her brother Leopolda source, doubtless of great intellectual profit. In 1802, when she was but sixteen, much against her own wish, and only in compliance with the entreaties of her beloved father who wished to see his only surviving daughter married, in such troublesome times, ere the end of his precarious and sickly life came-she became the wife of the Prince of Leiningen, a man eight-and-twenty years her senior. The union was most inappropriate and unwise. Her husband was repugnant in person and manners. He failed either to secure her confidence or contribute to her happiness. Yet she fulfilled her duties as a wife and mother in so exemplary a manner, from her marriage to her husband's death, in 1814, that the breath of slander never sullied her fair fame. Indeed, by the purity of her life, the manner in which she discharged her maternal duties, and the graceful suavity of her manners, she did much to ennoble the character of the House of Leiningen, which her husband had done much to lower. Her marriage with the Duke of Kent was one of unmistakable affection, and was a very happy one. Their tastes were similar; but her meekness and tact had a beneficial influence in mitigating a certain stern and abrupt brusqueness which he partly inherited from his father, and partly derived from the camps and garrison towns in which his youth was spent. The simplicity and tender unaffectedness of her manners—a peculiarity distinctive of the highest class of well-bred German women-and her fascinating combination of

gentleness with gaiety, not only won and bound, by daily increasing ties, the affections of her husband, but of all those who had the good fortune to become personally acquainted with her admirable life and disposition

CHAPTER IV.

FIRST YEARS OF CHILDHOOD.

Old Memories of Kensington Palace-Enlargements of the Structure by William III., Anne, Queen Caroline, and the Duke of SussexMaids of Honour-Rank and Beauty in the Gardens-Wilberforce and the Infant Princess-Victoria at Ramsgate-A Picture of Victoria when Five Years old-Her Physical Training-Popularity as a Child-Her Youthful Charities-A Narrow Escape from Death-Early Development of Quick Intelligence-Anecdotes -Love of Nature-Proneness to Self-will-But Counterbalanced by Candour-Waggishness-A Portrait of the Child-Princess by Leigh Hunt.

THE infancy, girlhood, and budding womanhood of the Princess Victoria were chiefly spent at the Royal Palace of Kensington. It was her mother's fixed residence, but the family were much at Claremont, where the Queen testifies that she spent the happiest days of her childhood. There were frequent trips made, too, to various watering-places; and, as the Princess grew in years, visits were paid at the country houses of some of the nobility. Leigh Hunt, in his exquisite book of gossip entitled "The Old Court Suburb," thus happily describes the more salient and prominent features of the somewhat sombre region of the Queen's up-bringing :

In vain we are told that Wren is supposed to have built the south front, and Kent (a man famous in his time) the east front. We can

no more get up any enthusiasm about it as a building, than if it were a box or a piece of cheese. But it possesses a Dutch solidity; it can

be imagined full of English comfort; it is quiet; in a good air; and, though it is a palace, no tragical history is connected with it: all which considerations give it a sort of homely, fireside character, which seems to represent the domestic side of royalty itself, and thus renders an interesting service to what is not always so well recommended by cost and splendour. Windsor Castle is a place to receive monarchs in; Buckingham Palace to see fashion in; Kensington Palace seems a place to drink tea in: and this is by no means a state of things in which the idea of royalty comes least home to the good wishes of its subjects. The reigns that flourished here, appositely enough to this notion of the building, were all tea-drinking reigns—at least on the part of the ladies; and if the present Queen does not reign there, she was born and bred there, growing up quietly under the care of a domestic mother; during which time, the pedestrian, as he now goes quietly along the gardens, fancies no harsher sound to have been heard from the Palace windows than the "tuning of the tea-things," or the sound of a pianoforte.

The associations of Kensington Palace are almost entirely with the earlier Hanoverian reigns; the later Georges neglected it. Rumour hath it that this royal domain originated in the establishment of a nursery for the children of Henry VIII. If it were so, Elizabeth and Victoria must have been brought up on the same spot; but the tradition is not well supported. Its first ascertained proprietor was Heneage Finch, Speaker of the House of Commons at the accession of the First Charles, who built and occupied only a small nucleus of the present structure, which was enlarged from time to time by most of its successive occupants, but with no pretension, and without much plan. From the second Earl of Nottingham, the grandson of Finch, William III. bought the house and grounds. The latter he enlarged to the extent of twenty-six acres. To these Anne added thirty, and to these in turn Queen Caroline, wife of George II., added three hundred.

KENSINGTON PALACE.

25

The house had been the while proportionately growing. Its last expansion was contributed by the Duke of Sussex.

The gardens were pedantically squared to Dutch uniformity by William of Orange, and the semblance of a Court which he held in this Palace was correspondingly gloomy and dismal. The most singular visitor ever received by William was the Czar Peter, who drove hither incognito in a hackney coach, on his arrival in London, and was afterwards entertained here with some slight show of state. In Anne's time, the palace and gardens were little livelier than in William's. The Queen hedged herself in behind absurd chevauxde-frise of etiquette, and the court chroniclers of the period record little else than eating and drinking. Swift and Prior, Bolingbroke and Marlborough, Addison and Steele, nevertheless, lent occasional gleams of brightness and dignity to the otherwise sombre scene.

The most fascinating and memorable association of Kensington Palace is in connection with the Courts of the first two Georges, and of the son of the latter, Frederick Prince of Wales. These associations are specially connected with the bevies of frolicsome, and sometimes frail, maids of honour, who now live in the pages of Pope and Gay, of Hervey and Walpole. Chief among them was the gay, sprightly, and irresistible Molly Leppell, who resisted, in a manner equally indignant and comical, the degrading overtures of the coarsesouled George II. She married Hervey, the most effeminate and egregious dandy of his time. Chesterfield thus toasted her in a ballad on the beauties of the Court: