drawing maps, for example, and learned geography
with no small care and industry. He knew all about the family histories
and genealogies of his gentry, and pretty histories he must have known. He
knew the whole _Army __ List_; and all the facings, and the exact number
of the buttons, and all the tags and laces, and the cut of all the cocked
hats, pigtails, and gaiters in his army. He knew the _personnel_ of the
Universities; what doctors were inclined to Socinianism, and who were
sound Churchmen; he knew the etiquettes of his own and his grandfather's
Courts to a nicety, and the smallest particulars regarding the routine of
ministers, secretaries, embassies, audiences; the humblest page in the
ante-room, or the meanest helper in the stables or kitchen. These parts of
the royal business he was capable of learning, and he learned. But, as one
thinks of an office, almost divine, performed by any mortal man--of any
single being pretending to control the thoughts, to direct the faith, to
order the implicit obedience of brother millions, to compel them into war
at his offence or quarrel; to command, "In this way you shall trade, in
this way you shall think; these neighbours shall be your allies whom you
shall help, these others your enemies whom you shall slay at my orders; in
this way you shall worship God;"--who can wonder that, when such a man as
George took such an office on himself, punishment and humiliation should
fall upon people and chief?

Yet there is something grand about his courage. The battle of the king
with his aristocracy remains yet to be told by the historian who shall
view the reign of George more justly than the trumpery panegyrists who
wrote immediately after his decease. It was he, with the people to back
him, who made the war with America; it was he and the people who refused
justice to the Roman Catholics; and on both questions he beat the
patricians. He bribed: he bullied: he darkly dissembled on occasion: he
exercised a slippery perseverance, and a vindictive resolution, which one
almost admires as one thinks his character over. His courage was never to
be beat. It trampled North under foot: it bent the stiff neck of the
younger Pitt: even his illness never conquered that indomitable spirit. As
soon as his brain was clear, it resumed the scheme, only laid aside when
his reason left him: as soon as his hands were out of the
strait-waistcoat, they took up the pen and the plan which had engaged him
up