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Her true nature, if dull and incapable of the higher moods of feeling, was gentle and inoffensive. Her judgment was often distorted by prejudice, under the influence of which she became anxiously suspicious, while in some instances she showed an unforgiving temper and an implacable resentment. But she was in general long-suffering and considerate, and her bitterest resentments were free from vindictiveness. She could be generous even in her hatred, as her undeserved bounty to the Duchess of Marlborough after the disgrace of that favourite sufficiently testifies. Perhaps, if we consider the beneficial influence over the mind of a nation of a really good though weak character in the prominent situation of sovereign, we may feel that we have undervalued the significance of Anne's personal qualities, and assigned her a lower place among our Sovereigns than is warranted in fact. But however we may congratulate ourselves on the fortunate manner in which events actually developed themselves, notwithstanding her feebleness of mind and her peculiar prejudices, it is impossible to shut our eyes to what might have been the consequences of this dangerous weakness; and while we are willing to acquiesce in the contemporary verdict which affirmed her essential goodness, we are compelled to deny altogether in her case any claim to the rank of a great sovereign.

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GEORGE THE FIRST.

LORD STANHOPE introduces his notice of the reign of George the First with the following remark:-‘A hard fate that the enthronement of a stranger should have been the only means to secure our liberties and laws! Almost a century of foreign masters! Such has been the indirect, but the undoubted effect of the Great Rebellion. Charles and James, driven abroad by the tumults at home, received a French education and pursued a French policy. Their Government was overthrown by a Dutchman; George the First and George the Second were entirely German; and thus, from 1660 to 1760, when a truly English monarch once more ascended the throne, the reign of Queen Anne appears the only exception to a foreign dominion.' The foreign birth and feelings of the first two Georges presented themselves to the mind of the greatest of English satirists of the present age in a somewhat different point of view. 'It was lucky for us,' says Mr. Thackeray, 'that our first Georges were not more high-minded men ; especially fortunate that they loved Hanover so much as

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to leave England to have her own way. Our chief troubles began when we got a king who gloried in the name of Briton, and being born in the country, proposed to rule it. He was no more fit to govern England than his grandfather and greatgrandfather, who did not try. It was righting itself during their occupation. The dangerous, noble old spirit of Cavalier loyalty was dying out; the stately old English High Church was emptying itself; the questions dropping which, on one side and the other the side of loyalty, prerogative, Church and King: the side of right, truth, civil and religious freedom-had set generations of brave men in arms. By the time when George the Third came to the throne the combat between loyalty and liberty was come to an end, and Charles Edward, old, tipsy, and childless, was dying in Italy.' There is much truth in both these views of the position, though I can hardly acquiesce unreservedly in either. It by no means follows that had the House of Stuart escaped its first exile, the English character of the Monarchy would have been secured in anything but the mere name. Charles the Second, in accordance with his father's marriage-articles, would have been placed for education at an early age in the hands of his French mother and her foreign priests and Frenchified counsellors at Court; the influence of France, not only of her policy, but of her social habits and national stamp, would have shaped the future not

only of the King, but of the people of England, and a divergence of sentiment between the two would have been avoided, not by the King being more English, but by the nation becoming more French. From this, at any rate, with its probable consequences, the 'Great Rebellion' saved us; and while the nationalism of the dynasty was suspended for a century, the continuity of English feelings in the nation remained unbroken. On the other hand, it can only be looked upon as a poor consolation that a civil conflict between King and People was avoided during the reigns of the two first princes of the House of Hanover only by the absence of a common interest.

But whatever may be our judgment as to the national gain or loss involved in the accession of the House of Hanover, there can be no doubt as to the very trying and invidious position which that family was called upon to occupy in ascending the Throne of England.

To begin with, its connection with the dynasty which it succeeded was too remote to exercise any perceptible influence on the sympathies of the nation. The associations in the English popular mind which had, in the early part of the seventeenth century, gathered round the name and cause of the beautiful Queen of Bohemia-the representative of the Protestant cause on the Continent of Europe-had been much weakened by the more recent memories of her younger sons Rupert and Maurice; nor had the

conduct of their elder brother Charles been such as to remove the prejudice thus engendered. The Englishmen of the early part of the eighteenth century were called upon to renew, if they could, these faded impressions of an old attachment in favour of the son of the youngest sister of these Princes of the Civil War period, a man of fifty-four years of age, who had not visited England since the reign of Charles the Second; whose father, whose education, whose associates, and whose habits were all German, who could not speak English, and who, if he understood anything of English politics was entirely ignorant of English feelings and modes of thought. Nor was there anything in his previous career, as there was in that of William the Third, to command the admiration of Englishmen, in default of their affections. He had been merely known as a petty electoral prince, whose only public appearances, in the European contest against Louis the Fourteenth, had indicated his courage and sense of honour rather than his capacity. William-if a foreigner and unpopular himself-bad at his side a devoted wife, who was both English and popular, and who seemed to continue rather than to break the dynastic associations of Englishmen. But Sophia of Hanover, the mother of George the First, was almost as completely a foreigner in habits and feelings as himself; and if she had achieved a European reputation as a highly accomplished woman, and a liberal and wise patron

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