THE HANOVERIAN QUEENS OF ENGLAND.*
IT is not easy to write a continuation of Miss Strickland, whose work, we fancy, will be more highly appreciated as
time goes on. The measure of its merit may fairly be taken, perhaps, by imagining that excellent writer with the same access to original sources and authorities of all kinds as is
the privilege of every amateur of the present day. Adding
this knowledge to her good style, clear thought, decided opinions, and gift of picturesque description, Miss Strickland would have given the Hanoverian Queens and the eighteenth century that touch of human charm which by nature and treatment they generally lack.
Miss Greenwood' Lives of Sophia Dorothea of Celle and Caroline of .Ansbach are not of the first importance, either as biography or as literature. At the same time, the volume is inevitably full of interest. The pathetic figure of Sophia Dorothea has always an attraction, whether we believe her guilty or not, and the real truth of the tragic story seems to be still out of reach. One may say that the fair and foolish woman had her revenge on the house of Hanover through George IL and Frederick his son, and so on by that touch of frivolous lightness which in her own French mother, Eleonore d'Olbreuse, was purely charming, but when mixed with German qualities became hurtful, if not fatal, to character. We arc quite in agreement with Miss Greenwood in declining to whitewash George I., who, even if injured, was heartless, cruel, and greedy. We would also warn her readers and ours against putting much faith in the gossiping letters of Charlotte Elisabeth, Duchess of Orleans, who, by an odd slip, is called on p. 37 "Henrietta of Orleans."
Though the character and fate of Caroline of Ansbach were commonplace compared with those of Sophia Dorothea, her life, as here given, is decidedly more interesting. She is an unhackneyed subject ; besides which, both she and George II. had so many enemies in their own time, and were victims of so many cruel slanders from the cleverest tongues and pens in the kingdom, most of which took the Prince of Wales's side in his desperate quarrel with his father, that her good and great qualities have been much ignored in history. Her faults were those of her time. Her affection for her husband, of whom she was the strength and stay, "inspired," as Miss Greenwood says, "nothing but derision among line people." That Caroline's biographer finds her character "elusive" we do not much wonder, for she was by no means an easy person to understand ; but it must be acknowledged that her portrait here, from its fullness and detail, gives a very fair impression of one of the strongest-minded women and best Queens who ever wore the English crown ; and that at a time when home and foreign politics, as well as family affairs, made her position exceptionally difficult.
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