let him beware how he sinks himself into a | and an immortality of happiness in the world to pedant, or a virtuoso. It is a mean talent which come. excels in trifles; the fine arts are more likely to flourish under a prince, whose ignorance of them is qualified by general and impartial goodwill towards their professors, than by one who is himself a dabbler; for such will always have their favourites and favouritism, and never fails to irritate the minds of men concerned in the same studies, and turns the spirit of emulation into the gall of acrimony. It is not perhaps generally known, that his late majesty came into the world at the term of seven months, and yet his constitution was sound and vigorous. The innate goodness of his heart exhibited itself at a very early period, and his general dispositions had a tendency to whatever was amiable and pleasing. The fol lowing anecdote, when he was yet in petticoats, will fully justify the above remarks. It has been kindly transmitted by the descendant of the individual who was present when the circumstance took place: "I had the honour," he says, "when the present prince of Wales was in petticoats, to be in the nursery with him, when a poor man presented himself at the window; the prince was then playing with half-a-crown. Nurse,' says he, let me give that poor man my money.' Sir,' answered the nurse, your royal highness may be deceived, for he may not deserve notice.' 'I am sure,' said the prince, there must be notice taken of him, for he looks very sick, and is almost naked: you know I only play with the money, but when the poor man has got it, he will buy victuals and clothes with it.'" Above all things it should be the inviolable maxim of a prince, to distinguish strongly and pointedly in his attentions between men of virtuous morals, and men of vicious. There is nothing so glorious and at the same time nothing so easy; if he bestows his smile upon the worthy only, he need be at little pains to frown upon the profligate; all such vermin will crawl out of his path, and shrink away from his presence. Glittering talents will be no passport for dissolute morals, and emulation will then be reckoned in no other case but that of virtue; men will not choose crooked passages and bye alleys to preferment, when the broad highway of honesty is laid open and straight before them. A prince, though he gives a good example in his own person, what does he profit the world if he draws it back again by the bad example of those whom he employs and favours? Better might it be for a nation to see a libertine on its throne surrounded by virtuous counsellors, than to contemplate a virtuous sovereign delegating his authority to unprincipled and licentious servants. The king who declares his resolution of counte-attached, it cannot be expected that the most nancing the virtuous only amongst his subjects, speaks the language of an honest man; if he makes good his declaration, he performs the functions of one, and earns the blessings of a righteous king; a life of glory in this world, From the secluded state in which his late majesty passed the early days of his youth, which was partly owing to the particular dispositions of his father, and after his decease, to the cabals and intrigues of the court, the myrmidons of which used every endeavour to blacken and defame the character of his mother, to whom he was most affectionately minute particulars were treasured for the future historian of his life, or that many which then floated upon the stream of popular report have not been swept away, and lost in the vortex of oblivion. It will not here be necessary to enlarge on | than a successor of William III. This charge the supposed errors or defects of his education is a stain upon the memory of lord Bute, from under lord Bute, which appears to have been conducted by systematic rules, if not upon generous and enlightened principles. A partiality more than was due to Scotland is said to have been insinuated by that nobleman into the mind of his pupil. The truth, however, of this charge rests upon no solid foundation. In process of time lord Bute succeeded to the ministry. That he brought forward his countrymen is true enough, but it was by extending to them the patronage of office, not, except in some few instances, by directly introducing them to the personal favour of the king. Among the exceptions must be placed Mr. Charles Jenkinson, father to the present first lord of the treasury, who, in early life, held the humble but not unimportant office of private secretary in lord Bute's household, and was the supposed medium of a secret intercourse between the sovereign and his favourite, when the latter had ostensibly retired. As these matters, however, will be treated on more fully in the history of lord Bute's ministry, we shall confine, ourselves at present to those particular circumstances, which in the course of his education appeared to have a predominant influence over the mind of the young prince. Although lord Bute may exonerate himself from the charge of partiality to his countrymen, which has no particular relation to the early years of our late sovereign, yet, he cannot wholly wipe away the reproach which attaches to him for having endeavoured to instil into the mind of his pupil those principles which are repugnant to the true spirit of the British Constitution. It appeared to be the aim of the directors of the king's education, to fill his mind with high prerogative prejudices and tory predilections, more befitting a despot of the Stuart line, which his warmest partizans cannot exonerate him. There is little doubt that his lordship endeavoured to assimilate the political principles of the young prince to those by which he himself was actuated, and by which it was his design to rule the empire, when his pupil should ascend the throne. To this end the liberal plans of the prince's preceptors were baffled. The course of instruction which they suggested for him was set aside by lord Bute's interference. A work written by father Orleans, a jesuit, was made the manual of the future sovereign of these realms. When doctor Hayter, bishop of Norwich, engaged doctor Tucker to prepare an elementary work on the principles of commerce and of political economy, as a fit subject of study for the chief of a free and commercial kingdom, the noxious influence of the earl was employed to frustrate this salutary project, and the worthy bishop resigned. Lord Harcourt who was the prince's governor, demanded an audience of George II., to complain of the mischievous attempts which were made to instil into the mind of the prince of Wales a predilection for tory doctrines, and no satisfaction being afforded him by his majesty, lord Harcourt gave in his resignation at the same time with the bishop, in December 1752. Some of the points insisted on by his lordship on the sine qua non of his continuance in office were, that Andrew Stone, a friend of lord Bute, a Mr. Scott, (recommended by lord Bolingbroke,) and Cresset, a creature of the princess of Wales, should be dismissed from the establishment. Lord Bute's attempt, however, to mislead his pupil, altogether failed of success. There never existed a sovereign, indeed it may be doubted, if there has ever lived a well-educated English gentleman more warmly attached to the laws of England, and | by the populace publicly burning the effigies of herself and the noblemen under whose superintendence he then was, (lord Bute), he mildly reproved her weakness and womanish fears, by saying, Pooh! pooh! suffer not your feelings to be thus affected by such idle stories, which have, perhaps, no foundation in truth; on the contrary, those who have conveyed the tales to you, were most probably the very persons who applied the flames. to the constitutional rights of the people, or more firm in his determination to guard both inviolate, than our late lamented monarch; and, that this is no false nor inflated panegyric, will be evident from various acts which he committed during his long and momentous reign. Under the tutors who were selected for him, the acquirements of the prince were neither very extensive, nor very important. The general course of his education seems to have been guided more with a view to the business of life, than to its embellishments. He made small progress in classical learning, nor were his advances in Roman literature calculated to afford him a lively enjoyment of its beauties. In the Greek he was still more deficient; but he spoke the modern languages with ease and elegance. He studied early, and correctly understood the history of modern times, and the just relations of England with the other states of Europe. But the conscientious strictness in morals, and the uniform impressions of piety which he so strikingly displayed in every situation of life, are the most undeniable proofs, that in the most essential points, the cultivation of his mind had not been neglected. From the restricted nature of his late majesty's education and habits, his character assumed a certain degree of sedateness, and he was remarkable, through life, for his attention, and the correctness of his conduct on the most trying occasions, to which his exalted rank exposed him. This line of character was never more strongly marked than in the advice which he gave to his mother, to treat with the most perfect contempt and disregard all those idle, malicious, and insinuating reports, which were disseminated against her, from the most base and unjustifiable motives. On one occasion, It is possible that a female, whose conduct may be as pure as the snow new fallen, or as chaste as the first thought which is born in the infant mind, shall, notwithstanding, be dogged through life by the fiends of calumny and detraction. That rumour, which at best is built on surmises and conjecture, had been most busy in diffusing its baneful poison over the "fair name" of the princess of Wales is too well known to admit here the question of it. The vituperating spirit of the age was called into action, and malice and envy found some garbage wherewith to gorge themselves to satiety. It is not, however, solely in the most exalted, but also in the humbler stations of life, that the vampyres of detraction fasten on the character of others, and think to throw a gloss over their own degenerate nature, by a fictitious statement of another's frailty. The princess of Wales was hateful to a particular party, and to destroy her influence, and render her unpopular, the arrows of calumny were doubly steeped in poison, and shot at random at her from every quarter. That they succeeded in wounding the peace of her mind is certain, but they failed in alienating her friends from her; and in after times her noble-minded son, when he ascended the throne, stood forth as the champion. of the injured fame of his mother, and discarded from his presence all those who had been The prince was at all times particularly attentive to his mother, as well as to those who had the care of his instruction; and from the precarious and unsettled state of her health, it was his constant practice to visit her very early in the morning, from which he probably acquired the habit of early rising, to which he uniformly adhered during the whole of his life. His studies were generally well attended to, though distinguished by no very great extent of capacity, or depth of intellect, although by a nice sense of propriety in most things, and an invariable disposition to reconcile and adjust the differences of those about him, which he was frequently called upon to exercise, not only in the family of his mother, but at an after period of life, in that of his own. The following may be taken as one of the many examples which will be recorded in the history of the above amiable trait in the character of the prince. He was one day in attendance, awaiting the arrival of his indisposed mother from the country, when he heard some of her servants inquire if the rooms had been well aired, and good fires kept in them, and the person whose particular office it was to attend to that department, gave the most positive assurance that the greatest attention had been paid to it; when on the other hand, it was shewn that the fire had never been lighted at all, by a piece of paper still remaining under the fuel, which had been purposely concealed there to convict the servant of dereliction of duty. The prince, instead of joining in the animadversions against the servant, expressed his displeasure in the strongest terms at the insidious method which had been adopted of entrapping the servant into the utterance of a falsity, concluding in his usual manner, that it would have been far more honourable and proper to have exposed the deceit, and then have reprimanded the servant whose duty and business it was to see that such offices were duly performed. As a prince and as a king, he always evinced the most marked antipathy to every species of deception and evasion, in ordinary conversation, or in the common affairs of life. He was fully aware of their frequent occurrence in the fashionable world, in which the tongue too often belies the real dictates of the heart, and in his own peculiarly significant manner would remark the words yes or no were the most useful and important in our language, though they did not actually imply any thing, This yes or no gave rise to a very severe retort which he met with as prince of Wales, when his attachment to a lady of a particular persuasion was generally known. Receiving once an evasive answer from a handsome lady, he said, he admired a plain yes or no from beautiful lips more than the most studied phrase: "Your royal highness means," retorted the lady, "a yea or nay." Whatever may have been the errors which his father, Frederick prince of Wales, committed in the education of his son, and which have been grossly magnified by various persons according to their private or political opinions, it is an undoubted fact, that every endeavour was used by his father to instil into the mind of his son, the highest veneration for the liberties of the country, and the blessings of our invaluable Constitution. Prince George was but eleven years old when he had a present made to him of a copy of Addison's Cato, most superbly bound, with the following lines, taken from the verses which accompanied Mr. Addison's present of his tragedy to the mother of Frederick, prince of Wales: Thou too, the darling of our fond desires, Whom Albion, op'ning wide her arms, requires, The following PROLOGUE was spoken by prince George. To speak with freedom, dignity and ease, To learn those arts, which may hereafter please; Teach our young hearts with generous fire to burn, Tattain these glorious ends, what play so fit, Should this superior to my years be thought, Know 'tis the first great lesson I was taught. What though a boy, it may with pride be said, A boy in England born, in England bred: Where freedom well becomes the earliest state, For there the love of liberty's innate. Yet more before my eyes those heroes stand, Whom the great William brought to bless this land; To guard with pious care, that generous plan, power well bounded-which he first began. But while my great fore-fathers fire my mind, The friends, the joy, the glory of mankind; Can I forget, that there is one more dear? But he is present—and I must forbear. The EPILOGUE was spoken by princess Augusta and prince Edward. Of PRINCESS AUGUSTA. The Prologue's fill'd with such fine phrases, George will alone have all the praises, Unless we can (to get in vogue) Contrive to speak an epilogue. PRINCE EDWARD. George has, 'tis true, vouchsafed to mention His future gracious intention; In such heroic strains, that no man And, trust me, I'll not thwart his will, Why, not to under-rate your merit, Could I have one of England's breeding; But 'tis a point they're all agreed in, That I must wed a foreigner, And cross the sea-the Lord knows where; In England born, my inclination, |