same clay with a Spaniard. They repelled and suppressed the Bible! that first book which a true legíslator 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

THE Prince of Wales, after a long retirement from public life, was recalled by an event which created the deepest sorrow throughout the empire. 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 himself no longer as an inhabitant of earth, and often, when he

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."

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

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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

tact, it was, like Coriolanus, for their "voices;" it was to be carried by them in triumph, that he condescended to trust himself in their hands. His object was less to overthrow the higher ranks, than to force his way among them; less to raise an unknown name by flinging his firebrand into the temple of the constitution, than to menace government until it purchased off the incendiary; he had no internecine hatred of all that was above him in genius, birth, or fortune.

But, culprit as he was, there was grave occasion for him at the time. All power loves increase; an arbitrary spirit was creeping on the constitution; that spirit which, like the toad at the ear of our first parents, is content to come in the meanest shape, but which contains within itself the powers of a giant armed. The prerogative which had been wrested from the throne was usurped by the minister, and a secretary of state's warrant differed from a lettre de cachet only in name. While those committals were valid, no man was secure; and liberty must either have perished, or been restored by the desperate remedy of a revolution. Wilkes fought this battle at his own risk, for the country; and, selfish as his patriotism was, the service deserves not to be forgotten.

But, from this crisis the king came out unstained. Neither the crime nor the resistance was his. And in that calmer hour which, soon or late, comes to all men, Wilkes, satisfied and old, and with leisure to repent of faction, was in the habit of offering a ready homage to the virtues and sincerity of the king.

After a few years the king was summoned to war by the revolt of America. The success of that revolt cannot justify it. If the colonies were oppressed, the oppression was retracted, and they were offered even more than they had ever asked. But their object had speedily grown, from relief into rebellion,