Mr. John Hancock, on occasion a generous man, erected a platform and
placed there a pipe of Madeira which was broached for all comers. At
Colonel Ingersoll's, where twenty-eight gentlemen attended to take
dinner, fifteen toasts were drunk, "and very loyal they were, and suited
to the occasion"; upon which occasion, we are told, Mr. Hancock again
"treated every person with cheerfulness." Throughout the land men with
literary gifts, or instincts, delivered themselves of vigorous free
verse, founded upon the antithesis of Freedom and Tyranny, and enforcing
the universal truth that "in the unequal war Oppressors fall, the hate,
contempt, and endless curse of all." In New York, on the occasion of the
King's birthday, an ox was roasted whole in the Fields, and twenty
kegs of beer were opened for a great dinner at the King's Arms; and
afterwards, through the generosity of the Assembly of that province,
there was erected on the Bowling Green a mounted statue--made of lead
but without present intention of being turned into bullets representing
His Majesty King George the Third, of ever glorious memory, the Restorer
of Liberty.

The joyful Americans could not know how little King George aspired to
be thought the Restorer of Liberty. In reality he was extremely sulky
in his silent, stubborn way over the repeal of the Stamp Act, and vexed
most particularly at the part which he himself had been forced to
play in it. The idea of a Patriot King, conceived by Lord Bolingbroke
(one-time Jacobite exile) and instilled into the mind of the young
Hanoverian monarch by an ambitious mother, had little to do with
liberty, either British or colonial, but had much to do with authority.
The Patriot King was to be a king indeed, seeking advice of all virtuous
men of whatever connections, without being bound by any man or faction
of men. It was not to restore liberty, nor yet to destroy it, but to
destroy factions, that the King was ambitious; and for this purpose he
desired a ministry that would do his bidding without too much question.
If Mr. Grenville did not satisfy His Majesty, it was not on account
of the Stamp Act, in respect to which the King was wholly of Mr.
Grenville's opinion that it was a just law and ought to be enforced. In
July, 1765, when Mr. Grenville was dismissed, there had indeed as yet
been no open resistance in America; and if the King had been somewhat
annoyed by the high talk of his loyal subjects in Virginia, he had been