Wurtemberg as the girl-Princess Royal, with a dog. (She died in Wurtemberg
about this time, 1828. She had quitted England on her marriage in 1797,
and in the thirty-one years of her married life only once came back, as an
aging and ailing woman. She proved a good wife and stepmother.) A youthful
family group of an earlier generation was sure to attract a child--George
III. and his brother, Edward, Duke of York, when young, shooting at a
target, the Duke of Gloucester in petticoats, Princess Augusta (Duchess of
Brunswick, and mother of Caroline, Princess of Wales) nursing the Duke of
Cumberland, and Princess Louisa sitting in a chaise drawn by a favourite
dog, the scene in Kew Gardens, painted in 1746. Queen Elizabeth was there
as a child aged seven, A.D. 1540--three-quarters, with a feather-fan in
her hand. Did the guide of the little unconscious Princess pause
inadvertently, with a little catch of the breath, by words arrested on the
tip of the tongue, before that picture? And was he or she inevitably
arrested again before another picture of Queen Elizabeth in her prime,
returning from her palace, wearing her crown and holding the sceptre and
the globe; Juno, Pallas, and Venus flying before her, Juno dropping her
sceptre, Venus her roses, and the little boy Cupid flinging away his bow
and arrows, and clinging in discomfiture to his mother because good Queen
Bess had conquered all the three in power, wisdom, and beauty? We know the
Princess must have loved to look at the pictures. More curious than
beautiful as they were, they may have been sufficient to foster in her
that love of art which has been the delight of the Queen's maturer years.

English princesses, even though they were not queens in perspective, were
not so plentiful in Queen Victoria's young days as to leave any doubt of
their hands and hearts proving in great request when the proper time came.
Therefore there was no necessity to hold before the little girl, as an
incentive to good penmanship, the example of her excellent grandmother,
Queen Charlotte, who wrote so fair a letter, expressed with such