The Reign of George III. - (Concluded.) page 28

Though no perception of this new creation of human beings, as it were, from the clods and stones of the earth - of this new era, where every man should eventually become a king, with powers, arts, and intellectualises yet undreamed of, could have entered into the most clairvoyant moment of George's prime, and though he died wholly unconscious of the growing of this new birth in the pregnant body of the time, he carried with him the respect of his subjects for his integrity, crippled as it was by narrow intellectual vision, and for his piety, though it brought forth such little fruit in his own family. There had been something wrong in his domestic realm, as well as in his public one. The Singular spectacle of a couple of sovereigns, religious, moral, and orderly, and a family for the most part immoral and disorderly, was a peculiar one, and can only be explained by the examination of matters which belong only to the meta- physician. It is not our duty to inquire why the king failed in this respect; it is our business to prevent only the mistake, which would be a great one, of attributing the superior order of things which was about to take place either to the monarch or the ministry which ruled in his name. It was a regeneration arising out of the vital forces of the nation itself. Its energies were culminating from a thousand causes - from accumulated knowledge, artistic skill, governmental experience, and from the same old and indestructible root in the British nature which achieved Magna Charta, curbed the will of the rigorous Edward III., and of the still more haughty Elizabeth, broke through the deep-laid trains of Charles I., and his Laud and Went- worth, and drove for ever from England the hopeless James II. The resistance under George III. to the despotic efforts of the regent, of Sidmouth, Castlereagh, and Liverpool, was but the yet unfolded force which went on growing, ever clearer and more expansive, in literature, laws, and philanthropies humanities to the present time. All these points we shall now elucidate and establish by facts.