Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/288

268 was solidly Protestant and unmoved by the pathetic appeals of the Pretender's claims.

So the new King reluctantly took up his abode in his new capital. His court was German; he had to converse with his Ministers in Latin; his divorced wife was pining away her life in a gloomy castle across the waters; his eldest son and heir was with him to learn English, but his heart was in his beloved Hanover. The ways of the English were passing strange to him.

"This is a strange country," he said. "The first morning after my arrival at St. James's, I looked out of the window and saw a park with canals which they told me were mine. The next day, the ranger of my park sent me a fine brace of carp out of my canal, and I was told I must give to the servant five guineas for bringing me my own carp out of my own canal in my own park."

There was much, indeed, to astonish him in London. Though the population of his kingdom was but about a fifth of what it is to-day, yet London with its seven hundred thousand inhabitants was considered a vast city, absorbing as it did one-tenth of the whole population of England and Wales. What must he have thought of London's great highway, the Thames, with its