and affecting, are told
of his behaviour 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 music-roll 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 it, thinking it no shame to
appear where that good man was seen. He is said not to have cared for
Shakespeare 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 gracious monarch, do compose yourself." But he continued to
laugh, and 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 for ever
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 practise; what knowledge he could master, he strove to
acquire. He was for ever