80 KEW GARDENS 



O dark, dark, dark ! Amid the blaze of noon, 

 Irrecoverably dark ! Total eclipse 

 Without all hope of day ! 

 O first created Beam, and Thou, Great Word, 

 " Let there be light ! and light was over all," 

 Why am I thus bereaved Thy prime decree ? 



When George III. was laid with his fathers 

 in 1820, his stout-hearted and narrow-minded 

 Queen had gone before him. To the last she 

 tried to do her duty, according to her lights. 

 Reconciled, at least outwardly, to her eldest son 

 indeed it appears that all along the strict 

 moralist had something of woman's weakness for 

 that rake she exerted herself to play the figure- 

 head of his Court, taking the place of his discarded 

 wife ; and she shared his unpopularity to such an 

 extent as to be hissed by the mob on her way to 

 hold a Drawing-room ; then, after the death of 

 the Princess Charlotte, she had to face an out- 

 burst of popular resentment in the City. By the 

 autumn of 1818 she was hopelessly prostrated by 

 dropsy. On the way from London to Windsor 

 her state became so serious that a halt was made 

 at Kew Palace ; and there she died in a chair, in 

 the room now marked by a brass tablet, her 

 last looks, it is said, fixed on a picture of The 

 Dropsical Woman. 



