It
waded, with inglorious struggles, through a deep mire of mud, between
the Palace and Hyde Park, until the cortege entered Kensington Park, as
the gardens were then called, and began to track the old road that led
to the red-brick structure to which William III. had added a higher
story, built by Wren. There are two roads by which coaches could
approach the house: 'one,' as the famous John, Lord Hervey, wrote to his
mother, 'so convex, the other so concave, that, by this extreme of
faults, they agree in the common one of being, like the high road,
impassable.' The rumbling coach, with its plethoric steeds, toils slowly
on, and reaches the dismal pile, of which no association is so precious
as that of its having been the birthplace of our loved Victoria Regina.
All around, as the emblazoned carriage impressively veers round into the
grand entrance, savours of William and Mary, of Anne, of Bishop Burnet
and Harley, Atterbury and Bolingbroke. But those were pleasant days
compared to those of the second George, whose return from Hanover in
this mountain of a coach is now described.
The panting steeds are gracefully curbed by the state coachman in his
scarlet livery, with his cocked-hat and gray wig underneath it: now the
horses are foaming and reeking as if they had come from the world's end
to Kensington, and yet they have only been to meet King George on his
entrance into London, which he has reached from Helvoetsluys, on his way
from Hanover, in time, as he expects, to spend his birthday among his
English subjects.
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