al restraints under which he was
placed, might have made the misery of his people.

He died; and at once a new world opened. The young King was a born
Englishman. All his tastes and habits, good or bad, were English. No
portion of his subjects had anything to reproach him with. Even the
remaining adherents of the House of Stuart could scarcely impute to him
the guilt of usurpation. He was not responsible for the Revolution, for
the Act of Settlement, for the suppression of the risings of 1715 and of
1745. He was innocent of the blood of Derwentwater and Kilmarnock, of
Balmerino and Cameron. Born fifty years after the old line had been
expelled, fourth in descent and third in succession of the Hanoverian
dynasty, he might plead some show of hereditary right. His age, his
appearance, and all that was known of his character, conciliated public
favor. He was in the bloom of youth; his person and address were
pleasing. Scandal imputed to him no vice; and flattery might, without
any glaring absurdity, ascribe to him many princely virtues.

It is not strange, therefore, that the sentiment of loyalty--a
sentiment which had lately seemed to be as much out of date as the
belief in witches or the practice of pilgrimage--should, from the day of
his accession, have begun to revive. The Tories in particular, who had
always been inclined to King-worship, and who had long felt with pain
the want of an idol before whom they could bow themselves down, were as
joyful as the priests of Apis, when, after a long interval, they had
found a new calf to adore. It was soon clear that George the Third was
regarded by a portion of the nation with a very different feeling from
that which his two predecessors had inspired. They had been merely First
Magistrates, Doges, Stadtholders; he was emphatically a King, the
anointed of Heaven, the breath of his people's nostrils. The years of
the widowhood and mourning of the Tory party were over. Dido had kept
faith long enough to the cold ashes of a former lord; she had at last
found a comforter, and recognized the vestiges of the old flame. The
golden days of Harley would return. The Somersets, the Lees, and the
Wyndhams would again surround the throne. The latitudinarian prelates,
who had not been ashamed to correspond with Doddridge and to shake hands
with Whiston, would be succeeded by divines of the temper of South and
Atterbury. The devotion which had been so signally shown to the House of
Stuart, wh