designs for his country's good. But some misplaced sentiments of loyalty may have produced this strange paroxysm of devotion. The colour assumed by his gratitude for favours conferred upon his family and himself was of a more vulgar hue, and still less harmonised with the Great Commoner's exalted nature. On learning the King's intention to grant him a pension (in order effectually to undo him), he writes to Lord Bute a letter full of the most humiliating effusions of extravagant thankfulness-speaks of "being confounded with the King's condescension in deigning to bestow one thought on the mode of extending to him his royal beneficence" -considers "any mark of approbation flowing from such a spontaneous source of clemency as his comfort and his glory"-and prostrates himself in the very dust for daring to refuse the kind of provision tendered "by the King in a manner so infinitely gracious "-and proposing, instead of it, a pension for his family. When this prayer was granted, the effusions of gratitude" for these unbounded effects of beneficence and grace which the most benign of Sovereigns has condescended to bestow," are still more extravagant; and "he dares to hope that the same royal benevolence which showers on the unmeritorious such unlimited benefits may deign to accept the genuine tribute of the truly feeling heart with equal condescension and goodness." It is painful to add what truth extorts, that this is really not the sentiment and the language with which a patriot leaves his Sovereign's councils upon a broad difference of honest opinion, and after being personally ill used by that monarch's favourites, but the tone of feeling, and even the style of diction, in which a condemned felon, having sued for mercy, re

turns thanks when his life has been spared. The pain of defacing any portion of so noble a portrait as Lord Chatham's must not prevent us from marking the traits of a somewhat vulgar, if not a sordid, kind, which are to be found on a closer inspection of the original.

Such was the man whom George III. most feared, most hated, and most exerted his kingcraft to disarm ; and such, unhappily, was his momentary success in this long-headed enterprise against the liberties of his people and their champions; for Lord Chatham's popularity, struck down by his pension, was afterwards annihilated by his peerage.

LORD NORTH.

THE minister whom George III. most loved was, as has been already said, Lord North, and this extraordinary favour lasted until the period of the Coalition. It is no. doubt a commonly-received notion, and was at one time an article of belief among the popular party, that Lord Bute continued his secret adviser after the termination of his short administration; but this is wholly without foundation. The King never had any kind of communication with him, directly or indirectly; nor did he ever see him but once, and the history of that occurrence suddenly puts the greater part of the stories to flight which are current upon this subject. His aunt, the Princess Amelia, had some plan of again bringing the two parties together, and on a day when George III. was to pay her a visit at her villa of Gunnersbury, near Brentford, she invited Lord Bute, whom she probably had never informed of her foolish intentions. He was

walking in the garden when she took her nephew down stairs to view it, saying, there was no one there but an old friend of his, whom he had not seen for some years. He had not time to ask who it might be, when, on entering the garden, he saw his former minister walking up an alley. The King instantly turned back to avoid him, reproved the silly old woman sharply, and declared that, if ever she repeated such experiments, she had seen him for the last time in her

house. The assertion that the common reports are utterly void of all foundation, and that no communication whatever of any kind or upon any matter, public or private, ever took place between the parties, we make upon the most positive information, proceeding directly both from George III. and from Lord Bute. But we go farther; the story is contrary to all probability; for that Prince, as well as others of his family, more than suspected the intimacy between his old governor and his royal mother, and, according to the nature of princes of either sex, he never forgave it. The likelihood is, that this came to his knowledge after the period of his first illness, and the Regency Bill which he, in consequence of that circumstance, proposed to parliament; for it is well known that he then had so much regard to the Dowager Princess, as to turn out George Grenville because he passed her over as Regent. Consequently, the discovery which we are supposing him to have made must have been some time after Lord Bute's ministry closed. Certain it is that the feeling towards him had become, for some reason or other, not neutral, negative, or passive; but such as rules men, and still more princes, when favour is succeeded by dislike; for we may then say what was so wittily observed respecting Louis XV. on a very different occasion-" Il n'y a rien de petit chez les grands." His correspondence with his other ministers, to which we have had access, speaks the same language; a very marked prejudice is constantly betrayed against Scotchmen and Scotch politics.

The origin of Lord North's extraordinary favour was his at once consenting to take the office of prime

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minister when the Duke of Grafton, in a moment of considerable public difficulty and embarrassment, of what, in those easy days of fairweather, was called danger, suddenly threw up the seals, and retired to his diversions and his mistress at Newmarket. Lord North was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and leader of the House of Commons. He had thus already the most arduous by far of the government duties cast upon him; and his submitting to bear also the nominal functions and real patronage and power of First Lord of the Treasury, seemed but a slender effort of courage or self-devotion. As such, however, the King considered it; nor during the disastrous and really difficult times which his own obstinate bigotry and strong tyrannical propensities brought upon the country, did he ever cease to feel and to testify the lively sense he always felt of the obligation under which Lord North had laid him personally, by coming to his assistance upon that emergency. In fact responsibility, which to almost all official personages proves the greatest trial, is the most heavily felt, and the most willingly shunned, presses with peculiar weight upon the great public functionary, who by law is wholly exempt from it, and in practice never can know it, unless during the interval between one ministry and another. The less he is in general accustomed to this burthen, the more hard does he find it to bear when he has no minister to cast it upon. Accordingly kings are peculiarly helpless, extremely anxious, and not a little alarmed, when any event has, as they term it, "left them without a government." The relief is proportionably great which they expe