craft is in their calling criminal, by having placed before their eyes the examples of others-their signal punishment to deter from vice, their glorious reward to stimulate in well-doing. This salutary lesson will be taught if the friends of mankind, the votaries of duty, of peace, of freedom, be held up to veneration, while their enemies, themselves the slaves of ambition or avarice, and who would forge fetters for their fellow-creatures or squander their substance or their blood, are exhibited to the scorn and hatred of after-ages.

The chief objection to such a work, undertaken so soon after the persons whom it undertakes to portray have left this earthly scene, arises from the difficulty of preserving strict impartiality in considering their merits. This difficulty is not denied ; its formidable magnitude is not underrated. Even if no human feelings with respect to men, between whom and ourselves there may have existed relations of amity or of hostility, swayed the mind, yet are we ever prone to view through a distorting medium those whose principles agreed with or differed from our own upon questions still of daily occurrence of men, too, whose party connexions united them with classes still in existence and actively engaged in the proceedings of the present day.

But, while this is admitted to render the attempt difficult, it may not be found to make it hopeless.

At any rate we are placed in a choice of evils. A postponement till the day when there should be no possibility of passion or prejudice shading the path of the historian may extinguish the recollections, also, which alone can give value to his narrative. The transfer of the work to mere strangers, who can be animated by no feeling of a personal kind, leaves it in hands, if not altogether incapable of performing it satisfactorily, at least incomparably inferior in the power of giving vivid likenesses of contemporary statesmen. At the very least, these portraitures may be regarded as materials for history, if not worthy of being called historical themselves; and future penmen may work upon them with the benefit of contemporary testimony as to facts, though free from the bias which may have influenced the conclusions. The author can only affirm, and this he does most conscientiously, that he has ever felt under a sacred obligation to pursue the truth of his resemblances without either exaggeration or concealment; that he has written, or endeavoured to write, as if he had lived in a remote age or country from those whose rulers he has endeavoured to describe; and that, if any prejudices or predilections have operated upon his mind, they have been unknown to himself. He is quite aware that some may consider this as a very equivocal test of his impartiality, if they do not rather see in it an additional symptom of blind prepossession.

But he thinks the praise bestowed upon known political adversaries, and the disapproval, admitted to be just, of conduct frequently held by the party for whose services to the cause of freedom he is most grateful, will be taken as some evidence of general impartiality, though it may not suffice to exempt him from the charge of having sometimes unwarily fallen into the snares that beset the path of whoever would write contemporary annals.

GEORGE III.

THE centre figure round which the others that compose this picture group themselves, and with which they almost all have relations, is that of George III., a prince whose long reign, during by far the most important period in the history of the human race, rendered his character and conduct a matter of the deepest interest not only to the people of his vast dominions, but to all mankind. He presided over the destinies of the British Empire, the only free state in the world, during an age that witnessed the establishment of independence in the new hemisphere, and the extension of liberty over a great portion of the old. He ruled the most enlightened nation of modern times, while civilization, rapidly spreading in all directions, dispelled the remains of feudal darkness in Europe, carried its light over other quarters of the globe, and discovered and cultivated unknown regions. Wherefore, his capacity, whether to appreciate his position, or to aid in the progress of his people and his species, if he should have the wisdom to choose the right path, or to obstruct it, should he erro

neously deem resistance the better course, was a matter of the greatest importance both to himself personally, to the order in which his lot was cast, and to the rest of mankind. Unhappily he took the wrong direction; and, having once taken, persevered in it with the pertinacity that marks little minds of all ranks, but which in royal understandings often amounts to a mental disease.

Of a narrow understanding, which no culture had enlarged; of an obstinate disposition, which no education, perhaps, could have humanized; of strong feelings in ordinary things, and a resolute attachment to all his own opinions and predilections, George III. possessed much of the firmness of purpose which, being exhibited by men of contracted mind without any discrimination, and as pertinaciously when they are in the wrong as when they are in the right, lends to their characters an appearance of inflexible consistency, which is often mistaken for greatness of mind, and not seldom received as a substitute for honesty. In all that related to his kingly office he was the slave of deep-rooted selfishness; and no feeling of a kindly nature ever was allowed access to his bosom, whenever his power was concerned, either in its maintenance or in the manner of exercising it. In other respects, he was a man of amiable disposition, and few princes have been more exemplary in their domestic habits, or in the offices of private friend