GEORGE THE SECOND.

Sir Robert Walpole stated the fact, and from that day until three and thirty years after, George, the second of the name, ruled over England.

On the afternoon of the 14th of June, 1727, two horsemen might have been perceived galloping along the road from Chelsea to Richmond. The foremost, cased in the jackboots of the period, was a broadfaced, jolly-looking, and very corpulent cavalier; but, by the manner in which he urged his horse, you might see that he was a bold as well as a skilful rider. Indeed, no man loved sport better; and in the hunting-fields of Norfolk, no squire rode more boldly after the fox, or cheered Ringwood and Sweettips more lustily, than he who now thundered over the Rich-reconciled himself with the bold minmond road.

He speedily reached Richmond Lodge, and asked to see the owner of the mansion. The mistress of the house and her ladies, to whom our friend was admitted, said he could not be introduced to the master, however pressing the business might be. The master was asleep after his dinner; he always slept after his dinner: and woe be to the person who interrupted him! Nevertheless, our stout friend of the jackboots put the affrighted ladies aside, opened the forbidden door of the bedroom, wherein upon the bed lay a little gentleman; and here the eager messenger knelt down in his jackboots.

He on the bed started up, and with many oaths and a strong German accent asked who was there, and who dared to disturb him?

"I am Sir Robert Walpole," said the messenger. The awakened sleeper hated Sir Robert Walpole. "I have the honor to announce to your Majesty that your royal father, King George I., died at Osnaburg, on Saturday last, the 10th inst."

"Dat is one big lie!" roared out his sacred Majesty King George II.: but

How the King made away with his father's will under the astonished nose of the Archbishop of Canterbury; how he was a choleric little sovereign; how he shook his fist in the face of his father's courtiers; how he kicked his coat and wig about in his rages, and called everybody thief, liar, rascal, with whom he differed: you will read in all the history books; and how he speedily and shrewdly

ister, whom he had hated during his father's life, and by whom he was served during fifteen years of his own with admirable prudence, fidelity, and success. But for Sir Robert Walpole, we should have had the Pretender back again. But for his obstinate love of peace, we should have had wars, which the nation was not strong enough nor united enough to endure. But for his resolute counsels and good-humored resistance we might have had German despots attempting a Hanoverian regimen over us: we should have had revolt, commotion, want, and tyrannous misrule, in place of a quarter of a century of peace, freedom, and material prosperity, such as the country never enjoyed, until that corrupter of parliaments, that dissolute tipsy cynic, that courageous lover of peace and liberty, that great citizen, patriot, and statesman governed it. In religion he was little better than a heathen; cracked ribald jokes at bigwigs and bishops, and laughed at High Church and Low. In private life the old pagan revelled in the lowest pleasures: he passed his Sundays tippling at Richmond; and his holydays bawling after

dogs, or boozing at Houghton with | kidnapped big men all Europe over boors over beef and punch. He cared for letters no more than his master did he judged human nature so meanly that one is ashamed to have to own that he was right, and that men could be corrupted by means so base. But, with his hireling House of Commons, he defended liberty for us; with his incredulity he kept Church-craft down. There were parsons at Oxford as double-dealing and dangerous as any priest out of Rome, and he routed them both. He gave Englishmen no conquests, but he gave them peace, and ease, and freedom; the three-per-cents. nearly at par; and wheat at five and six and twenty shillings a quarter.

It was lucky for us that our first Georges were not more highminded men; especially fortunate that they loved Hanover so much as to leave England to have her own way. Our chief troubles began when we got a king who gloried in the name of Briton, and, being born in the country, proposed to rule it. He was no more fit to govern England than his grandfather and great-grandfather, who did not try. It was righting itself during their occupation. The dangerous, noble old spirit of cavalier loyalty was dying out; the stately old English High Church was emptying itself: the questions dropping which, on one side and the other; the side of loyalty, prerogative, church, and king; the side of right, truth, civil and religious freedom- had set generations of brave men in arms. By the time when George III. came to the throne, the combat between loyalty and liberty was come to an end; and Charles Edward, old, tipsy, and childless, was dying in Italy.

Those who are curious about European Court history of the last age know the memoirs of the Margravine of Bayreuth, and what a Court was that of Berlin, where George II.'s cousins ruled sovereign. Frederick the Great's father knocked down his sons, daughters, officers of state; he

to make grenadiers of: his feasts, his parades, his wine-parties, his tobaccoparties, are all described. Jonathan Wild the Great in language, pleasures, and behavior, is scarcely more delicate than this German sovereign. Louis XV., his life, and reign, and doings, are told in a thousand French memoirs. Our George II., at least, was not a worse king than his neighbors. He claimed and took the royal exemption from doing right which sovereigns assumed. A dull little man of low tastes he appears to us in England; yet Hervey tells us that this choleric prince was a great sentimentalist, and that his letters-of which he wrote prodigious quantities

were quite dangerous in their powers of fascination. He kept his sentimentalities for his Germans and his queen. With us English, he never chose to be familiar. He has been accused of avarice, yet he did not give much money, and did not leave much behind him. He did not love the fine arts, but he did not pretend to love them. He was no more a hypocrite about religion than his father. He judged men by a low standard; yet, with such men as were near him, was he wrong in judging as he did? He readily detected lying and flattery, and liars and flatterers were perforce his companions. Had he been more of a dupe he might have been more amiable. A dismal experience made him cynical. No boon was it to him to be clear-sighted, and see only selfishness and flattery round about him. What could Walpole tell him about his Lords and Commons, but that they were all venal? Did not his clergy, his courtiers, bring him the same story? Dealing with men and women in his rude, sceptical way, he came to doubt about honor, male and female, about patriotism, about religion. "He is wild, but he fights like a man," George I., the taciturn, said of his son and successor.

had.

Courage George II. certainly
The Electoral Prince, at the

head of his father's contingent, had | laughed, but kindly, at the odd old approved himself a good and brave garment, for bravery never goes out soldier under Eugene and Marlbor- of fashion.. ough. At Oudenarde he specially dis- In private life the Prince showed tinguished himself. At Malplaquet himself a worthy descendant of his the other claimant to the English father. In this respect, so much has throne won but little honor. There been said about the first George's was always a question about James's manners, that we need not enter into courage. Neither then in Flanders, a description of the son's German nor afterwards in his own ancient harem. In 1705 he married a prinkingdom of Scotland, did the luckless cess remarkable for beauty, for cleverPretender show much resolution. ness, for learning, for good temperBut dapper little George had a famous one of the truest and fondest wives tough spirit of his own, and fought ever prince was blessed with, and who like a Trojan. He called out his loved him and was faithful to him, brother of Prussia, with sword and and he, in his coarse fashion, loved pistol; and I wish, for the interest of her to the last. It must be told to romancers in general, that that famous the honor of Caroline of Anspach, duel could have taken place. The that, at the time when German two sovereigns hated each other with princes thought no more of changing all their might; their seconds were their religion than you of altering appointed; the place of meeting was your cap, she refused to give up Protsettled; and the duel was only pre-estantism for the other creed, although vented by strong representations an archduke, afterwards to be an emmade to the two, of the European peror, was offered to her for a bridelaughter which would have been caused by such a transaction.

groom. Her Protestant relations in Berlin were angry at her rebellious spirit; it was they who tried to convert her (it is droll to think that Frederick the Great, who had no religion at all, was known for a long time in England as the Protestant hero), and these good Protestants set upon Caroline a certain Father Urban, a very skilful Jesuit, and famous winner of souls. But she routed the Jesuit; and she refused Charles VI.; and she married the little Electoral Prince of Hanover, whom she tended with love, and with every manner of sacrifice, with artful kindness, with tender flattery, with entire self-devotion, thenceforward until her life's end.

Whenever we hear of dapper George at war, it is certain that he demeaned himself like a little man of valor. At Dettingen his horse ran away with him, and with difficulty was stopped from carrying him into the enemy's lines. The King, dismounting from the fiery quadruped, said bravely, "Now I know I shall not run away;' and placed himself at the head of the foot, drew his sword, brandishing it at the whole of the French army, and calling out to his own men to come on, in bad English, but with the most famous pluck and spirit. In '45, when the Pretender was at Derby, and many people began to look pale, When George I. made his first visit the King never lost his courage -not to Hanover, his son was appointed he. "Pooh! don't talk to me that regent during the royal absence. But stuff!" he said, like a gallant little this honor was never again conferred prince as he was, and never for one on the Prince of Wales; he and his moment allowed his equanimity, or father fell out presently. On the ochis business, or his pleasures, or his casion of the christening of his second travels, to be disturbed. On public son, a royal row took place, and the festivals he always appeared in the Prince, shaking his fist in the Duke hat and coat he wore on the famous of Newcastle's face, called him a day of Oudenarde; and the people | rogue, and provoked his august father.