the old pagan revelled in the lowest
pleasures: he passed his Sundays tippling at Richmond; and his holidays
bawling after dogs, or boozing at Houghton with boors over beef and punch.
He cared for letters no more than his master did: he judged human nature
so meanly that one is ashamed to have to own that he was right, and that
men could be corrupted by means so base. But, with his hireling House of
Commons, he defended liberty for us; with his incredulity he kept
Church-craft down. There were parsons at Oxford as double-dealing and
dangerous as any priests out of Rome, and he routed them both. He gave
Englishmen no conquests, but he gave them peace, and ease, and freedom;
the three per cents nearly at par; and wheat at five-and six-and-twenty
shillings a quarter.

[Illustration]

Ave Caesar

It was lucky for us that our first Georges were not more high-minded men;
especially fortunate that they loved Hanover so much as to leave England
to have her own way. Our chief troubles began when we got a king who
gloried in the name of Briton, and, being born in the country, proposed to
rule it. He was no more fit to govern England than his grandfather and
great-grandfather, who did not try. It was righting itself during their
occupation. The dangerous, noble old spirit of cavalier loyalty was dying
out; the stately old English High Church was emptying itself: the
questions dropping, which, on one side and the other;--the side of loyalty,
prerogative, church, and king;--the side of right, truth, civil and
religious freedom,--had set generations of brave men in arms. By the time
when George III came to the throne, the combat between loyalty and liberty
was come to an end; and Charles Edward, old, tipsy, and childless, was
dying in Italy.

Those who are curious about European Court history of the last age know
the memoirs of the Margravine of Bayreuth, and what a Court was that of
Berlin, where George II's cousins ruled sovereign. Frederick the Great's
father knocked down his sons, daughters, officers of state; he kidnapped
big men all Europe over to make grenadiers of; his feasts, his parades,
his wine parties, his tobacco parties, are all described. Jonathan Wild
the Great in language, pleasures, and behaviour, is scarcely more delicate
than this German sovereign. Louis XV, his life, and reign, and doings, are
told in a thousand French memoirs. Our George II, at