Oh Arcadia! what a life it must have been! There used to be Sunday drawing-rooms at court; but the young king stopped these, as he stopped all that godless gambling whereof we have made mention. Not that George was averse to any innocent pleasures, or pleasures which he thought innocent. He was a patron of the arts, after his fashion; kind and gracious to the artists whom he favored, and respectful to their calling. He wanted once to establish an Order of Minerva for literary and scientific characters; the knights were to take rank after the knights of the Bath, and to sport a straw-colored ribbon and a star of sixteen points. But there was such a row among the literati as to the persons who should be appointed, that the plan was given up, and Minerva and her star never came down among us.

He objected to painting St. Paul's as Popish practice; accordingly, the most clumsy heathen sculptures decorate that edifice at present. It is fortunate that the paintings, too, were spared, for painting and drawing were woefully unsound at the close of the last century; and it is far bet ter for our eyes to contemplate whitewash (when we turn them away from the clergyman) than to look at Opie's pitchy canvases, or Fuseli's livid monsters. And yet there is one day in the year-a day when old George loved with all his heart to attend it-when I think St. Paul's presents the noblest sight in the whole world; when five thousand charity children, with cheeks like nosegays, and sweet fresh voices, sing the hymn which makes every heart thrill with praise and happiness. I have seen a hundred grand sights in the world-coronations, Parisian splendors, Crystal-Palace openings, Pope's chapels with their processions of

long-tailed cardinals and quavering choirs of fat sopranibut think in all Christendom there is no such sight as Charity Children's Day. Non Angli, sed angeli. As one looks at that beautiful multitude of innocents, as the first note strikes, indeed one may almost fancy that cherubs are singing.

Of church music the king was always very fond, showing skill in it both as a critic and a performer. Many stories, mirthful and affecting, are told of his behavior at the concerts which he ordered. When he was blind and ill, he chose the music for the Ancient Concerts once, and the music and words which he selected were from Samson Agonistes, and all had reference to his blindness, his captivity, and his affliction. He would beat time with his musicroll as they sang the anthem in the Chapel Royal. If the page below was talkative or inattentive, down would come the music-roll on young scapegrace's powdered head. The theatre was always his delight. His bishops and clergy used to attend, thinking it no shame to appear where that good man was seen. He is said not to have cared for Shakspeare or tragedy much; farces and pantomimes were his joy; and especially when clown swallowed a carrot or a string of sausages, he would laugh so outrageously that the lovely princess by his side would have to say, "My gra cious monarch, do compose yourself." But he continued to laugh, at the very smallest farces, as long as his poor wits were left him.

There is something to me exceedingly touching in that simple early life of the king's. As long as his mother lived a dozen years after his marriage with the little spinet-player-he was a great, shy, awkward boy, under the

tutelage of that hard parent. She must have been a clever, domineering, cruel woman. She kept her household lonely and in gloom, mistrusting almost all people who came about her children. Seeing the young Duke of Gloucester silent and unhappy once, she sharply asked him the cause of his silence. "I am thinking," said the poor child. "Thinking, sir! and of what?" "I am thinking if ever I have a son I will not make him so unhappy as you make me." The other sons were all wild except George. Dutifully every evening George and Charlotte paid their visit to the king's mother at Carlton House. She had a throat complaint, of which she died; but to the last persisted in driving about the streets to show she was alive. The night before her death the resolute woman talked with her son and daughter-in-law as usual, went to bed, and was found dead there in the morning. "George, be a king!" were the words which she was forever croaking in the ears of her son; and a king the simple, stubborn, affectionate, bigoted man tried to be.

He did his best; he worked according to his lights; what virtue he knew he tried to practice; what knowledge he could master he strove to acquire. He was forever drawing maps, for example, and learned geography with no small care and industry. He knew all about the family histories and genealogies of his gentry, and pretty historic he must have known. He knew the whole Army List, and all the facings, and the exact number of the buttons, and all the tags and laces, and the cut of all the cocked hats, pigtails, and gaiters in his army. He knew the personnel of the universities; what doctors were inclined to Socinianism, and who were sound churchmen; he knew the etiquettes of

his own and his grandfather's courts to a nicety, and the smallest particulars regarding the routine of ministers, secretaries, embassies, audiences; the humblest page in the anteroom, or the meanest helper in the stables or kitchen. These parts of the royal business he was capable of learning and he learned. But, as one thinks of an office almost divine performed by any mortal man-of any single being pretending to control the thoughts, to direct the faith, to order the implicit obedience of brother millions, to compel them into war at his offense or quarrel; to command, “In this way you shall trade, in this way you shall think; these neighbors shall be your allies whom you shall help, these others your enemies whom you shall slay at my orders; in this way you shall worship God"-who can wonder that, when such a man as George took such an office on himself, punishment and humiliation should fall upon people and chief?

Yet there is something grand about his courage. The battle of the king with his aristocracy remains yet to be told by the historian who shall view the reign of George more justly than the trumpery panegyrists who wrote immediately after his decease. It was he, with the people to back him, who made the war with America; it was he and the people who refused justice to the Roman Catholics; and

both questions he beat the patricians. He bribed; he bullied; he darkly dissembled on occasion; he exercised a slippery perseverance and a vindictive resolution, which one almost admires as one thinks his character over. His courage was never to be beat. It trampled North under foot; it beat the stiff neck of the younger Pitt; even his illness never conquered that indomitable spirit. As soon as his