one portrait
represents George as he showed in the first year of his reign--alert,
young, smiling, with short-cut powdered hair, a rich flowered coat, and
the star and ribbon of the Garter on his breast. So might a young king
look called in the flower of his age to the control of a great country,
pleased, confident, and courageous. The other picture shows how the
King looked in the sixtieth year of his reign. The face is old and
wrinkled and weary; the straggling white locks escape from beneath a
fur-trimmed cap; the bowed body is wrapped in a fur-trimmed robe. The
time of two generations of men lay between the young king and the old;
the longest reign then known to English history, the longest and the
most eventful.

[Sidenote: 1760--George's qualifications for King]

George the Third started with many advantages over his predecessors of
the same name. He was an Englishman. He spoke the English language.
It was his sincere wish to be above all things English. He honestly
loved English ways. He had not the faintest desire to start a seraglio
in England. He had no German mistresses. He did not care about fat
women. He was devoted to his mother--perhaps a good deal too devoted,
but even the excess of devotion might have been pardonable in the
public opinion of England; certainly it was only his own weakness and
perversity that made it for a while not pardonable. He was of the
country squire's order of mind; his tastes were wholly those of the
stolid, well-intentioned, bucolic country squire. He would probably
have been a very respectable and successful sovereign if only he had
not been plagued by the ambition to be a king.

It is curious to remember that the accession of George {5} the Third
was generally and joyfully welcomed. A hopeful people, having endured
with increasing dislike two sovereigns of the House of Hanover, were
quite prepared to believe that a third prince was rich in all regal
qualities; in all public and private virtues. It would, perhaps, have
been unreasonable on the part of any dispassionate observer of public
affairs to anticipate that a third George would make a worse monarch
than his namesakes and immediate predecessors. The dispassionate
observer might have maintained that there were limits to kingly
misgovernment in a kingdom endowed with a Constitution and blessed with
a measure of Parliamentary representation, and that those limits had
been fairly reached by the two German p