ich had been proof against defeats, confiscations, and
proscriptions, which perfidy, oppression, ingratitude, could not weary
out, was now transferred entire to the House of Brunswick. If George the
Third would but accept the homage of the Cavaliers and High Churchmen,
he should be to them all that Charles the First and Charles the Second
had been.

The Prince, whose accession was thus hailed by a great party long
estranged from his house, had received from nature a strong will, a
firmness of temper to which a harsher name might perhaps be given, and
an understanding not, indeed, acute or enlarged, but such as qualified
him to be a good man of business. But his character had not yet fully
developed itself. He had been brought up in strict seclusion. The
detractors of the Princess Dowager of Wales affirmed that she had kept
her children from commerce with society, in order that she might hold an
undivided empire over their minds. She gave a very different explanation
of her conduct. She would gladly, she said, see her sons and daughters
mix in the world, if they could do so without risk to their morals. But
the profligacy of the people of quality alarmed her. The young men were
all rakes; the young women made love, instead of waiting till it was
made to them. She could not bear to expose those whom she loved best to
the contaminating influence of such society. The moral advantages of the
system of education which formed the Duke of York, the Duke of
Cumberland, and the Queen of Denmark, may perhaps be questioned. George
the Third was indeed no libertine; but he brought to the throne a mind
only half opened, and was for some time entirely under the influence of
his mother and of his Groom of the Stole, John Stuart, Earl of Bute.

The Earl of Bute was scarcely known, even by name, to the country which
he was soon to govern. He had, indeed, a short time after he came of
age, been chosen to fill a vacancy which, in the middle of a Parliament,
had taken place among the Scotch representative peers. He had disobliged
the Whig ministers by giving some silent votes with the Tories, had
consequently lost his seat at the next dissolution, and had never been
reelected. Near twenty years had elapsed since he had borne any part in
politics. He had passed some of those years at his seat in one of the
Hebrides, and from that retirement he had emerged as one of the
household of Prince Frederic. Lord Bute, excluded from public life, had