society was realized and revolted against by the best minds of the time.  Gay lampooned it in the “Beggars’ Opera,” Swift satirized it in “Gulliver’s Travels,” Defoe became by force of circumstances a moral teacher; Addison, Steele, all the essayists preached lay sermons; the novelists set out with the object, less to amuse than to instruct, to improve their readers.  This tendency, so marked in the literature of the time, is the evidence of the reforming influences at work.  But many years passed before their effect was perceptible.

There is nothing attractive about George the First and his two ugly old mistresses, the “Elephant” and the “Maypole”; nor about his court of Germans, utilizing their time in England by accumulating money to carry back to Hanover when the harvest time had passed.  George the Second, brave, but narrow and ill-tempered, embodied in himself the coarseness of the time.  He loved his wife, who was faithful to him through every outrage and every neglect.  He caused one side to be taken out of her coffin, so that when he should be laid beside her his dust might mingle with hers.  He esteemed her so highly, that in his grief at losing her, he went so far as to say that if she had not been his wife, he would have wished her for a mistress.  To this wife, whom, in his own way, he sincerely loved and sincerely mourned, he confided all the details of his amours with other women.  From Hanover, where he was acquiring Madame Walmoden as his mistress, “he acquainted the queen by letter of every step he took—­of the growth of his passion, the progress of his applications, and their success, of every word as well as every action that passed—­so minute a description of her person that, had the queen been a painter, she might have drawn her rival’s picture at six hundred miles’ distance.  He added, too, the account of his buying her, and what he gave her, which, considering the rank of the purchaser, and the merits of the purchase as he set them forth, I think he had no great reason to brag of, when the first price, according to his report, was only one thousand ducats—­a much greater proof of his economy than his passion."[118] Among many extraordinary relations and expressions his letters contained, “there was one in which he desired the queen to contrive, if she could, that the Prince of Modena, who was to come the latter end of the year to England, might bring his wife with him; and the reason he gave for it was, that he heard her Highness was pretty free of her person, and that he had the greatest inclination imaginable to pay his addresses to a daughter of the late Regent of France, the Duke of Orleans—­’un plaisir’ (for he always wrote in French), ’que je suis sur, ma chere Caroline, vous serez bien aise de me procurer, quand je vous dis combien je le souhaite.’  Such a request to his wife respecting a woman he never saw, and during his connection with Madame Walmoden, speaks much stronger in a bare narrative of the fact, than by any comment or reflections; and is as incapable of being heightened as difficult to be credited."[119]