conjure him back from the common
doom of kings. But George the Second was dead beyond the power of all
the fat and painted women in the world to help. "Friends," says
Thackeray in his Essay, "he was your fathers' king as well as mine; let
us drop a respectful tear over his grave." But indeed it is very hard
to drop a respectful tear over the grave of George the Second. Seldom
has any man been a king with fewer kingly qualities. He had courage,
undoubtedly--courage enough to be habitually described by the Jacobites
as "the Captain," but his courage was the courage of a captain and not
of a king. He was obstinate, he was narrow-minded, he was selfish, he
was repulsively and even ridiculously incontinent. The usual quantity
of base and servile adulation was poured over the Royal coffin. The
same abject creatures--they or their kind--that had rhymed their lying
verses over the dead Prince of Wales who had hated his father, now
rhymed their lying verses over the dead king who had hated his son. If
George the Second had been a more common man, instead of being Elector
of Hanover and King of England, one might have said of him frankly
enough that he was a person about as little to be admired as a man well
could be who was not a coward or in the ordinary sense of the term a
criminal. But because he was a crowned king, it was regarded as a
patriotic duty then to make much of the {305} departed monarch, and to
talk of him in the strain which would have been appropriate if he had
been a Marcus Aurelius. The best, perhaps, that can be said of him is
that, on the whole, all things considered, he might have been worse.
It would be unfair to a George who has, at a long interval, to succeed
him, to say that George the Second was actually the worst of his line
and name; but he was so little, so very little, worthy, that the
fulsome pens must have labored in his praise. If many people rejoiced
at his removal, it would be hard to say who grieved with the exception
of a few, a select few, of his family and the hangers-on of the
Walmoden type, to whom his existence was the essential figure in their
own existence. To the vast bulk of the English people the matter was
of no moment whatever. All that they knew was that a second George,
who was Elector of Hanover, had passed away from the English throne,
and that a third George, who was Elector of Hanover, had mounted into
the vacant seat.

Never was a king better served than Geo