her virtues, left a considerable fortune. We get a passing glimpse of
the sister, Princess Sophia Matilda, in Fanny Burney's diary. She was
then a pretty, sprightly girl, having apparently inherited some of her
beautiful mother's and half-sisters' attractions. She was admitted to
terms of considerable familiarity and intimacy with her royal cousins;
and yet she was not of the circle of Queen Charlotte, neither could
she descend gracefully to a lower rank. No husband, royal or noble,
was found for her. One cannot think of her without attaching a sense
of loneliness to her princely estate. She survived her brother, the
Duke of Gloucester, ten years, and died at the age of seventy-two at
the Ranger's House, Blackheath, from which she had dispensed many
kindly charities. At her funeral the royal standard was hoisted half-
mast high on Greenwich Hospital, the Observatory, the churches of St.
Mary and St. Alphege, and on Blackheath. She was laid, with nearly all
her royal race for the last two generations, in the burial-place of
kings, St. George's Chapel, Windsor. Prince Albert occupied his stall
as a Knight of the Garter, with a mourning scarf across his field-
marshal's uniform.

In the middle of January, 1845, the Queen and Prince Albert went on a
visit to the Duke of Buckingham at Stowe, which was still unstripped
of its splendid possessions and interesting antiquarian relics. The
huge gathering of neighbours and tenants included waggons full of
labourers, admitted into the park to see the Queen's arrival and the
illumination of the great house at night.

The amusements of the next two days, the ordinary length of a royal
visit, began with _battues_ for the Prince, when the accumulation
of game was so enormous that, in place of the fact being remarkable
that "he hit almost everything he fired at," it would have been