the government were found equally feeble. The spirit of the juntas was timid, frivolous, and formalizing. With the most worthless part of national pride, they felt it an insult to be saved by the sword of strangers; with the lowest part of national prudence, they dreaded to irritate the enemy by defeating him. They hated the French, but they would not be helped by the English, and they could not help themselves. In this decrepitude, they solaced their wounded vanity by satires and ballads, determinations of future heroism, and the grand recollectionthat their forefathers had expelled the Moors, though the feat had cost them three hundred years!

Those absurdities should be remembered for higher purposes than ridicule. They show how totally the spirit of a grave and high-hearted people may be perverted by a false system of government. The old, generous virtue of the Spanish soil had now force enough only to throw up those flaunting weeds. With liberty, it had lost the rich productiveness of liberty. The juntas differed from the courtiers of the Philips and Ferdinands in nothing but a cockade.

A few years saw them sink into insignificance; and they merited their fate. They had made no use of the highest advantages of their connexion with England. From the great land of freedom, literature, and religion, they borrowed nothing but money and arms. They shrank from the natural and only means of renovating the national heart. While Spain was under the foot of her enemy, with the blood gushing from a thousand wounds, they would suffer no infusion of that living stream of health and virtue which glowed under the impregnable corslet of England.— They turned away their purblind eyes from the splendours which should have taught them to see; and abjured her press, her legislature, and, above all, her religion. The cry of "Heresy" was as keen as in the days of Loyola. They dug up the bodies of the English soldiers, as unworthy to sleep in the

same clay with a Spaniard. They repelled and suppressed the Bible! that first book which a true legislator would put into the hands of his people, even as the noblest manual of patriotism.

All the art of man was never able to reconcile religious slavery with civil freedom. What can be the independence of him who, but by the permission of a priest, dares not read the Bible-that first and most perennial source of freedom; that highest fount of stainless principle, unhesitating courage, and fidelity strong as the grave; which, while it ministers, beyond all philosophy, to the contentment of a private career, and divests the bosom of all eagerness for the trivial and vanishing distinctions of public life, yet lays every man under the responsibility of exerting his best powers for the public good; that book, which, teaching him to be zealous without violence, and aspiring without ambition, and filling his mind with calmer and loftier contemplations than the unsubstantial visions of earth, prepares him to look with composure on the severest sacrifices, solicit no other praise than the testimony of his own conscience, and silently devote himself to the cause of man, and of that mighty Being who will not suffer him to be tempted beyond his power.

CHAPTER XV.

The Regency.

THE Prince of Wales, after a long ietirement from public life, was recalled by an event which created the deepest sorrow throughout the empire. The affliction which, in 1788, had made the king incapable of government, was announced to have returned.*

* October 25. 1810.

'A Regency bill, with restrictions, to last for a year, was passed. The more than useless bitterness of the old contest was not renewed; its leaders had perished; a judicious declaration that the prince, from respect to the king, would make no immediate change in the ministry, at once quieted fears and extinguished hopes; and, with all resistance at home conquered, or neutralized, he entered upon the great office of regent of a dominion extending through every quarter of the globe, numbering one hundred millions of people, and constituting the grand resource of liberty, knowledge, and religion to mankind.

The reign of George the Third was now at an end, for though nominally monarch, he never resumed the throne. The lucid intervals of his malady soon ceased, and the last ten years of his life were passed in dreams. Perhaps this affliction, from which human nature shrinks with such terror, was meant in mercy. He had lost his sight some years before; and blindness, a fearful privation to all, must have been a peculiar suffering to one so remarkable for his habits of diligence and activity. The successive deaths of those whom we love, are the bitter portion of age; and in the course of a few years the king must have seen the graves of his queen, his son, and of that granddaughter, whose early death broke off the lineal succession of his throne. It is gratifying to the recollections which still adhere to this honest and good king, to believe that, in his solitude, he escaped the sense of those misfortunes. The mind, "of imagination all compact," is not to be reached by exterior calamities. All that human care could provide for the comfort of his age was sacredly attended to. A letter from the Princess Elizabeth to Lady Suffolk, one of the former suite of the royal family, states-"that his majesty seemed to feel perfect happiness; he seemed to consider himseif no longer as an inhabitant of earth, and often, when she

played one of his favourite tunes, observed, that he was very fond of it when he was in the world. He spoke of the queen and all his family, and hoped that they were happy now, for he was much attached to them when in the world."

The character of George the Third was peculiarly English. Manly, plain, and pious in his individual habits, he was high-minded, bold, and indefatigable in maintaining the rights of his people and the honour of his crown. He was 66 every inch a king!" The sovereign of England differs in his office and spirit from all others; he is not an idol, to be shown forth only in some great periodic solemnity, and then laid up in stately uselessness; but a living and active agent, called to mingle among the hearts and bosoms of men; not a gilded bauble on the summit of the constitution, but a part of the solid architecture, a chief pillar of the dome. If this increase his sphere of duty, and compel him often to feel that he is but a man, it increases his strength and security. The independence of other monarchs may seem more complete, but history is full of examples of its precariousness; it is the independence of an amputated limb. The connexion of an English king with his people is the connexion of a common life, the same constitutional current running through the veins of all, a communion of feelings and necessities, which, if it compel the king to take a share in the anxieties of the people, returns it largely by compelling the people to take a vital interest in the honour and safety of the king. Placed by the law at the head of the commonwealth, he excites and enjoys the most remote circulation of its fame, wealth, and freedom; he is the highest and noblest organ of public sensation, but, for every impulse which he communicates, he receives vigour in return. "Agitat molem, magnoque se corpore miscet."

No sovereign of England was ever more a monarch, in this sense of public care, than George the

Third: he was altogether a creature of the commonwealth; his personal choice appointed his ministers, he sat in their councils, all their proceedings came under his revision; he knew nothing of favouritism nor party; and indulging a natural and generous interest in the fortunes of his friends to the last, he threw off with his boyhood the predilections of the boy, and thenceforth suffered no personal feelings to impede the business of the country.

The king's qualities were subjected to three stern successive tests, each exhibiting him in a different point of view, and each rising above the other in difficulty. He was thus tried as an individual, as an English monarch, and as the head of the European confederacy of thrones.

In the early part of his reign, the royal person was the first object of attack. All parties professed themselves alike zealous for the constitution, but the haters of government struck at the sitter on the throne. Ministers rose and fell too rapidly to make them a sufficient mark; the libel which would have been wasted upon those shadows, was levelled at the master who summoned them; and the manliness with which the king stood forward to take upon himself the responsibility of government, exposed him to every shaft of malice, disappointment, and revenge.

But assailants like those are born to perish; and the name of Wilkes alone survives, preserved, doubtless, by the real services which he involuntarily rendered to the constitution. Wilkes would have been a courtier by inclination, if he had not been a demagogue by necessity. Witty, subtle, and licentious, he would have glittered as an appendage to the court of Charles the Second; but the severe virtues of George the Third drove him to the populace. Yet he was altogether different from those who have since influenced the multitude. He had no natural gravitation to the mob: if he submitted to their con