prudently reconciled herself with
the king, and won the old man's confidence and goodwill. A shrewd, hard,
domineering, narrow-minded woman, she educated her children according to
her lights, and spoke of the eldest as a dull, good boy: she kept him very
close: she held the tightest rein over him: she had curious prejudices and
bigotries. His uncle, the burly Cumberland, taking down a sabre once, and
drawing it to amuse the child--the boy started back and turned pale. The
prince felt a generous shock: "What must they have told him about me?" he
asked.

His mother's bigotry and hatred he inherited with the courageous obstinacy
of his own race; but he was a firm believer where his fathers had been
freethinkers, and a true and fond supporter of the Church, of which he was
the titular defender. Like other dull men, the king was all his life
suspicious of superior people. He did not like Fox; he did not like
Reynolds; he did not like Nelson, Chatham, Burke; he was testy at the idea
of all innovations, and suspicious of all innovators. He loved
mediocrities; Benjamin West was his favourite painter; Beattie was his
poet. The king lamented, not without pathos, in his after-life, that his
education had been neglected. He was a dull lad brought up by
narrow-minded people. The cleverest tutors in the world could have done
little probably to expand that small intellect, though they might have
improved his tastes, and taught his perceptions some generosity.

But he admired as well as he could. There is little doubt that a letter,
written by the little Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz,--a letter
containing the most feeble commonplaces about the horrors of war, and the
most trivial remarks on the blessings of peace, struck the young monarch
greatly, and decided him upon selecting the young princess as the sharer
of his throne, I pass over the stories of his juvenile loves--of Hannah
Lightfoot, the Quaker, to whom they say he was actually married (though I
don't know who has ever seen the register)--of lovely black-haired Sarah
Lennox, about whose beauty Walpole has written in raptures, and who used
to lie in wait for the young prince, and make hay at him on the lawn of
Holland House. He sighed and he longed, but he rode away from her. Her
picture still hangs in Holland House, a magnificent masterpiece of
Reynolds, a canvas worthy of Titian. She looks from the castle window,
holding a bird in her hand, at black-eyed young Ch