CONTRAST BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND. 609 were deprived of one half or one third of their estates by the conversion of tenures, and lost their exclusive right to military promotion. Unlike the Gallic explosions, these vital innovations were effected without exciting alarm, almost without the notice of neighbouring powers. Prussia found, after the overwhelming defeat at Jena, the incompetence of her worn-out aristocracy, as Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal had done in contests with the new men, new principles, and new interests of the age. At Jena, not a single officer in the Prussian army was without the prefix "von " to his name, nor without a crest to his seal. All children alike succeeded to the title of the parent. If an earl had twelve children there were twelve earls or countesses. This idle vanity, poltroonery, and incapacity, was kept up by brevets in the army and offices in the state. Afterwards honours were thrown open to commoners, and trade to the nobility. France, herself, though experimenting towards them, has hardly yet compassed the essential elements of a happy futurity. Her revolution originated in political irresponsibilities and civil inequalities. There was no harmony of parts in her social edifice. A supreme despotism sunk in vice and incapacity, a liberține nobility, immoral church, incongruous judicial magistracy; and none of these great orders held in check by any intermediary balance of power, in legislation, religion, commerce, or industry. All in contrast to ourselves, among whom the prerogatives of the crown are strictly defined; an aristocracy in superb grandeur, but not stalled off in privilege and exclusiveness, but mingling in fair rivalry of statesmanship and private worth with the rest of society; and a representative commons, that substantively embodies and reflects the entire interests, intelligence, religrous and moral sentiment of the nation. To these con RR servative elements may be added the advantages of our more practical aptitudes, derived from lengthened experience, and the priceless treasure of examples which the Long Parliament, Cromwell, Monk, and the Restoration have transmitted for our guidance and caution. Protracted as the civil struggles of France appear to contemporaries, they have not endured so long as the past ones of England; and if she continue in the throes of revolution, it may be ascribed to the greater obstructions alluded to which confronted her at the outset, with probably some specialities in the impulsive character of her population, want of political tact or patriotic integrity in her leading men, the predominant rural occupation of her people, and their abject popish idolatry. The cause itself, however, remains intact and unimpeachable. That irresponsible government is sheer brutalising tyranny, remains the abiding faith; and though the mistakes of our neighbours or their rude embraces may have despoiled Liberty of some of her attractions, she still continues a goddess heavenly bright, worshipped, it may be, with less ardour, but more constant affection, than by a past generation : "No wonder, then, if our poetic sires Felt for her youthful bloom more genuine fires; Prologue to Fashionable Friends. CHAPTER XXIX. DEATH OF GEORGE III. His Character and Government. ·A Progressive Reign. THE king lived through the revolutionary war, but was unconscious of its triumphant conclusion. He was afflicted with a mental disorder, which first visited him in 1765; it originated a regency bill, upon which much debate ensued in both Houses, on the question whether the princess-mother should form part of the regency, or was included in the term royal family; but the bill was abandoned. At intervals the king continued to be visited by the same malady, and during the nine years preceding his death had not experienced a lucid interval; the regal office being vested by parliament in the heir apparent, at first with limited powers, and afterwards in full sovereignty. If the king, from incapacity, did not share in the general exultation at the return of peace, he was a stranger to the heavy calamities the war bequeathed, and which for seven years after deeply afflicted and agitated the realm. George III. died January 29. 1820. In the relations. of private life, and in capacity for government, he was superior to his two immediate predecessors. Exemplary in conjugal duties, religious, moral, and temperate, his conduct accorded with the national standard of propriety and decorum. His memory was retentive; his judgment shrewd and circumspect; his demeanour in pressing emergencies firm and fearless. He was consistent and conscientious; not knowingly a wrong-doer. In conversation he was easy and familiar, but inquisitive and repetitionary. He possessed no remarkable talent nor educational acquirement. For science and literature he had little taste; and the occupation of his leisure consisted in the chase, agriculture, mechanics, music, the theatres, and rustic festivals. Although the king was by birth an Englishman, the predilection of the Hanoverian elector had not become extinct. That the Brunswick family continued German is shown by the education given to the princes. Of the king's seven sons five were educated in Germany, and with the exception of the Duke of Sussex, whose health rendered such education impracticable, were all educated as the younger sons of German princes; that is, as German military. The narrow mind of the king may be attributed to his limited early training, cooperating with his indolent and incurious disposition. It is a remarkable fact in the history of a prince destined to the government of a great maritime empire, that at the age of thirty-four, long after he had ascended the throne, George III. had never seen the sea which environs his insular dominion, or been thirty miles from London.* Such a secluded existence seems more suited to the life of an eastern monarch or grand lama than the constitutional head of a European community. The efforts made by the king at the beginning of his reign, and not relinquished during the course of it, to relieve the crown from the pressure of the aristocracy were excusable, from the perplexing difficulties his German predecessors had experienced in the formation Walpole's Memoirs of George III., vol. iv. p. 327. HIS INDEPENDENT CONDUCT. 613 of ministries; but they tended to vest the government in the hands of a meaner agency than that of the heads of the great houses. In the construction of both Whigs and leading Tories it was the prerogative of the king to reign, not to govern. According to Lord North, "the king ought to be treated with all sort of respect and attention, but the appearance of power is all that a king of this country can have."* George III., however, sought to be something more than a name or popular show; and his struggles had the effect of rendering ministerial power less an object of the ambition of the grandees of party, causing it to be more exercised by the needy. cadets of noble families, or legal adventurers whose politics were secondary to professional interests or prejudices. Hence the ascendancy of a succession of Tory lawyers, of Mansfield, Thurlow, Kenyon, Loughborough, Eldon, and Perceval, to whose influence much of the arbitrariness of the court and its protracted bigotry may be attributed. The early part of the reign was the least exceptionable. The conclusion of peace in 1763, amidst brilliant triumphs, was magnanimous. There was, however, little dignity in the contest with Wilkes-it made his importance; nor in the exasperation manifested about the political trifles which elicited the ire of Junius. independence of the American colonies was one of those junctures in the history of nations that a government can neither avoid, nor, as the interest and honour of mother-countries were then understood, be quietly submitted to. Contrary to anticipation the issue was favourable to both parent and offspring, and the loss of empire in the West replaced by splendid acquisitions in the East. In the French revolutionary war the king was a leading * Memorials and Correspondence of Mr. Fox, vol. ii. p. 37. The |