479

GEORGE THE SECOND.

IF IT was the fate of George the First to attach to his person few, if any, warm admirers among his English subjects, it was the misfortune of his son and successor-George Augustus to evoke an amount of personal animosity which renders it difficult in the present day to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion respecting his character. That personal ill-feeling and personal resentment have much to do with most of the estimates of him which are preserved in the memoir-writers of the period is evident, if only from the fact that these accounts are so often self-inconsistent and incapable of being blended into an harmonious whole. Nor is the character of any one of the three chief authorities for the ordinary estimates of George the Second such as to induce us to place much reliance on their unsupported statements, or the judgments which they chose to pass upon their contemporaries. All three were shrewd men of the world and clever delineators of men and manners, and as such possess a certain value as historical witnesses; but all three were also men of strong

prejudices, and rather lax ideas as to the boundaries of truth and falsehood. Horace Walpole is known to everyone as the ideal of a thorough-paced gossip, with whom the goodness of a story is the first and main point, and its truth a very secondary consideration, and who would never scruple for a moment to colour or even invent where his prejudices prompted, or the completeness of the story seemed to call for the addition. The celebrated Lord Chesterfield, who had been a star in the firmament of Leicester House when George the Second was himself Prince of Wales and the centre of an Opposition Court, and who again for a time filled a similar position in the Court of Frederick, the succeeding Prince of Wales, has left us a Character' of his earlier patron which, on the whole, is more candid than could have been expected, though the animus of the writer peeps forth unmistakably in some of the paragraphs. But Lord Hervey, his contemporary and rival, warns us against placing trust in Chesterfield, whom he describes as utterly unscrupulous in his statements, and constantly sacrificing truth to epigrammatic effect. As to Lord Hervey himself, he has painted his own character in unmistakable colours in his 'Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second;' and Mr. Thackeray expresses in strong terms the horror with which this selfportraiture filled his mind. We cannot be too much on our guard against assuming as correct the characters drawn by men so brilliant and so little

fettered by conscientious scruples as these were, and it is better to be contented with the more trustworthy hints of a much better man, though less pointed writer, Earl Waldegrave, and with tamer deductions from established facts, than to give a false interest to this sketch by adopting these clever but doubtful representations.

The present Lord Stanhope pronounces George the Second to have been inferior to his father in intellect, but Lord Chesterfield's remark seems to bring us nearer to the truth:-'He had not better parts than his father, but much stronger animal spirits, which made him produce and communicate himself more.' Neither father nor son can justly lay claim to more than a very moderate amount of ability, but the range of George the Second's mind was much greater than his father's, and if he judged less soberly and soundly in some respects than the phlegmatic and precise George Louis did within his narrower sphere of thought, he entertained much more readily the possibility of outlying considerations beyond the boundaries of his own personal experience, and took an interest in a much greater number of things in which other people than himself were interested. But this very circumstance was disadvantageous to George the Second in any public comparison between his ability and that of his father, for the wider the area over which the sympathies of the former extended, and the greater and the more diversified the

objects on which his intellectual abilities were exercised, the more apparent became the poorness of those abilities, and the more salient any peculiarities of manner and disposition. The greater reserve of George the First also (however unpleasing and unpopular in itself) had not been without its effect in preventing the extent of his intellectual incapacity from being gauged. A silent man has always great advantages in this respect over a man of familiar and more communicative temperament. Not only does he not expose himself, but he is credited with a positive amount of wisdom to which he is really quite unentitled. But in George the Second the nature of his father had been materially modified by the irritable and impulsive temperament of his mother. He resembled his father, indeed, in his excellent business habits, his methodical arrangement of his time, and in that subservience to the force of habit which made Lord Hervey say of him that he seemed to think his having done a thing to-day an unanswerable reason for his doing it tomorrow.' Like his father, he was thoroughly rightminded in his intentions with respect to both the public and individuals. Lord Chesterfield admits that his first natural movements were always on the side of justice and truth,' though he avers they were often warped by ministerial influence, or the secret twitches of avarice.' The former of these limitations, of course, simply means that he some

times followed the counsels of his constitutional advisers instead of those of Lord Chesterfield. This writer adds that George was generally reckoned ill-natured, which indeed he was not. He had rather an unfeeling than a bad heart; but I never observed any settled malevolence in him, though his sudden passions, which were frequent, made him say things which in cooler moments he would not have executed. His heart always seemed to me to be in a state of perfect neutrality between hardness and tenderness.' There was equal courage in both the Georges, equal presence of mind in the face of great dangers, and a similar natural steadiness and pertinacity of purpose. But there were also marked differences between father and son. The mind of George the First was habitually at passions usually completely under his control; the mind of George the Second was always restless in a greater or less degree, and his passions at the mercy of every passing occurrence, however trivial. Though he thought much more about great things than his father, he was much more disturbed about little matters. This, Lord Chesterfield asserts, he was told by the King himself, and he confirms it by his own observation. I have often,' he says, 'seen him put so much out of humour at his private levée by a mistake or blunder of a valet de chambre, that the gaping crowd admitted to his public levée

rest, and his