your smallest wish, oppressed by the terrors of manhood and of the world
to come, and to believe, as you are told, that childhood is the only
happiness known; all this is quite terrible. And all Royal children,
of whom I have read, particularly George, seem to have passed through
greater trials in childhood than do the children of any other class.
Mr. Fitzgerald, hazarding for once an opinion, thinks that 'the
stupid, odious, German, sergeant-system of discipline that had been so
rigorously applied was, in fact, responsible for the blemishes of the
young Princes character.' Even Thackeray, in his essay upon George III.,
asks what wonder that the son, finding himself free at last, should have
plunged, without looking, into the vortex of dissipation. In Torrens'
Life of Lord Melbourne we learn that Lord Essex, riding one day with the
King, met the young Prince wearing a wig, and that the culprit, being
sternly reprimanded by his father, replied that he had 'been ordered
by his doctor to wear a wig, for he was subject to cold.' Whereupon the
King, to vent the aversion he already felt for his son, or, it may have
been, glorying in the satisfactory result of his discipline, turned to
Lord Essex and remarked, 'A lie is ever ready when it is wanted.' George
never lost this early-ingrained habit of lies. It is to Georges childish
fear of his guardians that we must trace that extraordinary power
of bamboozling his courtiers, his ministry, and his mistresses that
distinguished him through his long life. It is characteristic of the man
that he should himself have bitterly deplored his own untruthfulness.
When, in after years, he was consulting Lady Spencer upon the choice of
a governess for his child, he made this remarkable speech, 'Above all,
she must be taught the truth. You know that I don't speak the truth and
my brothers don't, and I find it a great defect, from which I would have
my daughter free. We have been brought up badly, the Queen having taught
us to equivocate.' You may laugh at the picture of the little chubby,
curly-headed fellows learning to equivocate at their mother's knee, but
pray remember that the wisest master of ethics himself, in his theory
of hexeis apodeiktikai, similarly raised virtues, such as telling the
truth, to the level of regular accomplishments, and, before you judge
poor George harshly in his entanglements of lying, think of the cruelly
unwise education he had undergone.

However much we may