firm determination to maintain,
perhaps extend it. At all events, he was resolved not to be a mere
name or a cipher in public affairs; and whether from a sense of the
obligations imposed upon him by his station, or from a desire to enjoy
all its powers and privileges, he certainly, while his reason remained
entire, but especially during the earlier period of his reign,
interfered in the affairs of government more than any prince who ever
sat upon the throne of this country since our monarchy was distinctly
admitted to be a limited one, and its executive functions were
distributed among responsible ministers. The correspondence which he
carried on with his confidential servants during the ten most critical
years of his life lies before us, and it proves that his attention was
ever awake to all the occurrences of the government. Not a step was
taken in foreign, colonial, or domestic affairs, that he did not
form his opinion upon it, and exercise his influence over it. The
instructions to ambassadors, the orders to governors, the movements of
forces, down to the marching of a single battalion, in the districts
of this country, the appointment to all offices in Church and State,
not only the giving away of judgeships, bishoprics, regiments, but the
subordinate promotions, lay and clerical,--all these form the topics
of his letters; on all his opinion is pronounced decisively; in
all his will is declared peremptorily. In one letter he decides the
appointment of a Scotch puisne judge; in another the march of a troop
from Buckinghamshire into Yorkshire; in a third the nomination to
the Deanery of Westminster; in a fourth he says, that, 'if Adam, the
architect, succeeds Worsley at the Board of Works, he shall think
Chambers ill used.' For the greater affairs of State it is well known
how substantially he insisted upon being the king _de facto_ as well
as _de jure_. The American War, the long exclusion of the Liberal
party, the French Revolution, the Catholic question, are all sad
monuments of his real power."

This is a true picture of George III., and why it should be supposed
that no descendant of that monarch will ever be able to make himself
potently felt in the government of his Empire we are at a loss to
understand. The exact part of that monarch would not be repeated, the
world having changed so much as to render such repetition impossible;
but the end at which George III. aimed, and which he largely
accomplished for h