The heart of his majesty was of too tender a nature not to feel an excess of joy in having been the means of saving his sister from perhaps an ignominious death, and he even projected a journey to Germany for the purpose of visiting her, and on which occasion it was his intention to take formal possession of his electoral dominions. The state of the political world at home, however, obliged him to relinquish this design, and he never afterwards put it into execution. jesty instructed his ambassador at the Danish | some time be prevailed upon to bia a finai court to make the most indignant remon- adieu. At length, after bestowing repeated strances, and an order was given for the caresses upon this darling object of her affecqueen's liberation, with permission to retire to tions, she retired to the vessel in an agony of Zell, where a separate establishment suitable despair. She remained upon deck, her eyes to her rank was to be provided for her. The immovably directed towards the palace of British ambassador himself hastened with these Cronenburg, where she had left her child, until tidings to Cronenburg. The queen had been darkness intercepted her view. The vessel permitted to inhabit the governor's apartment, having made but little way during the night, and to walk upon the side batteries, or upon at day-break she observed with fond satisfaction the leads of the tower. She was uncertain of that the palace was still visible, and could not the fate that awaited her, although she was be persuaded to descend to the cabin as long aware that her noble-minded brother had inte- as she could discover the feeblest glimpse of rested himself in her behalf, she had, however, the battlements. great reason to apprehend that the party which had caused her arrest meditated still more violent measures. When the English ambassador arrived with the orders for her enlargement, she was so surprised with the unexpected intelligence, that she instantly burst into a flood of tears-embraced him in a transport of joy, and called him her deliverer. After a short conference, the minister proposed, according to the secret instructions which had been sent to him by his king, that her majesty should immediately embark on board of a ship that was waiting to carry her from a kingdom in which she had experienced such an accumulated train of misfortunes. But however the usual motion for an address, the friends of anxious she was to depart, one circumstance checked the excess of her joy. A few months before her imprisonment, she had been delivered of a princess, whom she suckled herself, The rearing of this child had been her only comfort, and she had conceived a more than parental attachment to it, from its having been the constant companion of her misery. These circumstances had so endeared the child to her, that when an order for detaining the young princess was intimated to her, she testified the Parliament met for the despatch of business on the 14th January 1766, and the session was opened with a speech from the throne. On the new ministry spoke very tenderly of the disturbances raised in America in opposition to the stamp-act, terming them only occurrences, which gave great offence to the friends of the late ministry by whom that act had been passed. In Mr. Pitt's memorable speech against the American stamp-act, he took an opportunity of eulogising the Scottish nation, which at this time was highly unpopular in consequence of the preponderating influence of lord Bute, and the marked preference which was given to Mr. Pitt expressed himself in the following | upon which lord Rockingham asserted, that manner: “There is a clause in the act of settlement, to oblige every minister to sign his name to the advice which he gives his sovereign. Would it were observed !—I have had the honour to serve the crown, and if I could have submitted to influence, I might have still continued to serve; but I would not be responsible for others. I have no local attachments; it is indifferent to me whether a man was rocked in his cradle on this side or that side of the Tweed. I sought for merit wherever it was to be found. It is my boast that I was the first minister who looked for it, and I found it in the mountains of the north. I called it forth, and drew it into your service, an hardy and intrepid race of men!—men, who, when left by your jealousy, became a prey to the artifices of your enemies, and had gone nigh to have overturned the state in the war before the last. These men, in the last war, were brought to combat on your side: they served with fidelity, as they fought with valour, and conquered for you in every part of the world: detested be the national reflections against them!-they are unjust, groundless, illiberal, unmanly. When I ceased to serve his majesty as a minister, it was not the country of the man by which I was moved-but the man of that country wanted wisdom, and held principles incompatible with freedom." This eulogium of Mr. Pitt of the natives of a country to which his majesty had also testified particular partiality, raised him many degrees in the good opinion of his sovereign, but he was so unfortunate as to lose it again on account of the strenuous support which he gave to the bill for the repeal of the stamp-act. Indeed, during the progress of that bill, it was strongly insinuated in parliament, that the bill was very far from being agreeable to the king, his majesty's approbation of the measure was clear and unequivocal. On the following day, lord Strange maintained the contrary—that his majesty highly disapproved of the bill. Lord Rockingham was greatly surprised at this explicit declaration of lord Strange, and, at his next audience of the king, he requested the honour of his majesty's opinion in writing, which the king refused to give; however, it was subsequently discovered that the king had a change of ministers in contemplation, in consequence of the support which was given by the ministers of the day to the repeal of the stamp-act. Whatever degree of unpopularity his majesty was at this time doomed to endure, it certainly by no means originated in any imputed direliction of his duties as a man, a father, or a husband. If during the turbulent years of his early reign, or afterwards during the tempest of the French Revolution, his popularity was partially obscured for a moment, it was but for a moment, and the clouds passed away never to return. If the cause of this unpopularity be asked, it appears to be a matter of no difficulty to supply an answer; his character was minutely and essentially British. He comprehended in himself, to an almost unexampled extent, those high, holy, and valuable qualities which by the general consent of the wise and good among us, are considered as constituting the perfect Englishman. If we examine these qualities a little more minutely, we shall find that our late monarch was eminently simple in all his pursuits, tastes, and employments. Although he by no means threw away the necessary insignia of royalty-those wholesome distinctions which mark the gradations of rank, and which are never trampled upon with im punity-yet, a character of perfect simplicity reigned through every part of his conduct. He | quality in our late monarch, without which no assumed no unnecessary pomp: he invested genuine Englishman-no Englishman cast in himself with no superfluous splendour. As the celebrated dictator of the Roman empire was found in the season of his relaxation at the plough, so the monarch of this great empire delighted to sink from the sovereign into the private man. He ascended the throne when circumstances required it, with the majesty of one born to command; but he evidently loved to take a lower place. He bore the sceptre with unusual dignity, but plainly rejoiced when the hour arrived for laying it down. But amongst the virtues which distinguished our late sovereign, was that of constancy and fidelity to his friends. The love of change and novelty is one of the most common passions of our corrupt nature, and where all are soliciting our esteem, how strong is the temptation to transfer it to new objects, to shake off the troublesome or expensive dependant, and substitute those who cannot have any pretensions to ask favours, because they have not done any thing to deserve them. But the fiercest calumniators of the throne, and where is the throne without them, never attempted to fasten this stigma on our deceased sovereign. They reproached what they called his obstinacy, but never his constancy or fidelity. The friends of the first years of his reign were, as far as Providence had spared them, the friends of his growing years; and amidst the illusions of that disease which clouded the latter period of his existence, it is said that he would call up from the dead the early sharers of his counsel and regard, and converse with them as with spirits in glory. It was a reward mercifully vouchsafed to his constancy, that those early friends did not haunt him as enemies, but met him with countenances of gratitude and love. But we will take into our consideration that the mould of the good old time of the Reformation, would consent to consider the character of their fellow-countryman as completethat quality which is in fact the basis of all that is good and great in the mind and habits of man. Our late king was a man of scriptural, habitual, practical piety. In saying that his religion was scriptural, much is meant in the expression. His principles, views, tastes, interpretations of doctrine, and conceptions of practice, were faithfully, simply, exclusively drawn from holy writ. He regarded with alarm the slightest deviation from a scriptural model. He has been heard to express a wish to hear less of Socrates, and more of Christ, in the pulpit; he was deeply attached to the formularies and homilies of our own church-compositions which it is impossible to estimate too highly, and of the authors of which it may be said, that having as it were stepped first into the troubled pool at the period of the Reformation, they appear beyond all others to have experienced its healing efficacy. Our sovereign is reported himself to have said of these early writers, "There were giants on the earth in those days." Using then the scripture as his rule, and the fathers of the church as his chief interpreters, he had arrived at the clear recognition of all the leading doctrines of christianity-the corruption of the human heart,-the necessity of pardon through the atonement of a Saviour, and of the change and renewal of the man by the power and the influence of the Holy Ghost. He is known to have hung over the bed of a dying child, and there with solemn emphasis to have inculcated these doctrines as the sources of hope and joy to the contrite sinner. But his religion was not confined to the recognition of right prin ciples. He was, perhaps, the only sovereign | vice in his own habits. He did not, like one of in the world who attended the public services the Stuarts in our own country, or like some of religion every day. No one who was ever of the latter monarchs of France, poison the permitted to become a spectator of these stream of public morals at its fountain-head, solemn approaches to the throne of grace, is by presenting to the nation the example of a likely to forget either his venerable image, or polluted court. He frowned the profligate out the apparent intenseness of his devotions, when of the sphere in which he presided. He taught after Providence had deprived him of his sight, his people by his devotion to his family, that he was led to his seat in the chapel of his they might be sharers of that order of pleasures palace by the hands of his royal daughters. which their monarch, valued the most. He But to those denied the privilege of witnessing supplied to the country an example calculated this affecting scene, there remain many public to extend and perpetuate amongst us that taste and indisputable monuments of his personal which has been supposed to distinguish us piety. from some foreign nations, and which is one of the main pillars of our greatness and our welfare. It was, however, in his domestic character that his majesty shone pre-eminent. None, perhaps, but those who have moved in the high and noisy sphere of public life, or have lived upon the stimulants which it supplies, or have felt the influence of its great and commanding interests in lowering the importance of those of a simple and more private character, can estimate the difficulty of a dignified and happy retreat from the scenes of public life to the circle of a family. It is one of the mischievous consequences of publicity, that it ordinarily spoils men for retirement. Accordingly, scarcely any characters have been transmitted with more veneration to posterity than those who, uninjured by camps and senates, could, as it were, sheath their energies when the conflict was over, retire joyfully from the gaze of the world, and find both happiness and diffuse it in the family circle. To the small company of individuals distinguished by the possession of this double capacity for public and private life, our late revered monarch may, without hesitation, be added. He lived, as much as the lowest of his cottagers, for the benefit and comfort of the family with which Providence had surrounded him. He supplied no precedent for The personal decision and magnanimity of his majesty shone in a most conspicuous manner at various periods of his momentous life. It will never be forgotten by his country, with what calmness he encountered the fury of more than one poor insane creature who attempted to destroy him; how boldly he exposed himself to the violence of the mob in any moment of irritation; with what magnani mity at the period of the riots, he decided when his ministers faltered and hesitated to adopt the only measure which humanely speaking could have saved the metropolis or the country. Nor let this quality be undervalued. Valour in the moment of battle, when every passion is inflamed, when retreat or concealment is impossible, when the suggestions of cowardice are hushed in the din of arms, or shouts of victory; when sympathy fans the spark of doubtful valour, such courage is a common quality. But solitary courage,-courage without excitement, without passion, without tumult, without the stimulus of hatred or the hope of revenge, is the quality of no ordinary mind. It is the proper attribute of kings, and we loved our king in part, because | particular persons a most alarming feature; this he eminently possessed it. But in order to advance to the consideration of what may be more properly termed the moral qualities of his mind, it must be observed, that our late sovereign was characterized by a spirit of the deepest conscientiousness. He is well known in one instance to have declared, in regard to certain political concessions demanded of him, that he would rather lay his head on the block than concede that, which he conceived himself bound by his oath to his country to refuse. And, on the spirit of this splendid declaration he appears habitually to have acted. Where is the solitary instance in which he sacrificed conscience to interest, to terror, or to persuasion? When did he trifle with his oath to God, or his pledges, to his country? Politicians may differ as to the deci. sions to which his conscience conducted him, but none are rash or wicked enough to charge him with evasion, with a spirit of compromise, with a surrender of right to expedience, with giving his conscience into the keeping of his interest, with endeavouring to twist the straight letter of the word of God, or the stubborn maxims of common equity, into all the crooks and windings of state policy. We have been led into this minute delineation of his majesty's character, in consequence of the many very gross aspersions which at this period of our history were cast upon him. Men, who had no opportunities of knowing the secret springs by which his actions were guided, stepped forward upon the arena of public abuse, and vilified a character, which, although it had its shades, was yet ornamented with those splendid hues, the brightness of which was too great for their jaundiced eyes to support. Amongst the many accusations accusation was, that his majesty was fast verging to atheism-a charge as groundless and unsubstantial, and as black in its origin as the mind which could have conceived it, or the heart which could have engendered it. It arose, however, from a singular circumstance which took place at this time, namely, the grant of a persion 100l. per annum to the celebrated Rousseau. Hume the historian was the person who undertook to obtain this pension; and, on Hume's arrival in England from France, he stated the matter to his majesty's ministers, and particularly to general Conway, secretary of state, and general Græme, secretary to the queen. Application was accordingly made to their majesties, who readily assented, on condition that the transaction should not be made public. The reason of this stipulation was, that these great personages did not choose to appear publicly to countenance the author of obnoxious writings. Rousseau himself expressed himself highly pleased with the conditional article of secrecy. At the time, however, that Rousseau and Hume were at Paris, another star in the bright constellation of British genius was irradiating the gay circles of Paris, namely Horace Walpole, and his extreme turn for pleasantry led him to exercise it at the expense of poor Rousseau. He fabricated a letter to Rousseau as if written by the king Prussia, offering him an asylum in his dominions. This celebrated letter found its way all over Europe, and it appeared at last in the St. James's Chronicle of April 7, 1766. The indignation of Rousseau was now at the highest pitch, and he consi dered Hume as an accessary to the writing of the letter. Hume denied the allegation, but still pressed Rousseau to accept the pension. Rousseau, however, refused so long as the stipu |