bers of our circulating-library readers will obtain from these volumes an amount of knowledge respecting the history of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers which they would have been very unlikely to acquire by any more patient method. Mr. Jesse has worked himself into a most kindly and sympathising spirit with the hero of his biography. We believe that any impartial man, or any one honest though slightly prejudiced in the other direction, would experience the same result from acquiring a real familiarity with the sayings and doings of the worthy old monarch. But, inasmuch as Mr. Jesse is fully saturated with the commonplaces of ordinary liberalism, there is occasionally a gentle conflict in his pages between the stern principles of the politician and the weakness of the biographer. Moreover, he is, or pretends to be, credulous to an extent unworthy of one possessed of so much good sense as he frequently exhibits. But as this credulity generally manifests itself in the eager reception of 'telling' stories on slight authority, we set it down, in fact, as the trick of a caterer for popular taste rather than as the natural bent of his genius. To the same unlucky cause we attribute the most serious blemish of the book in our eyes-the extreme particularity with which he dwells on all the details of the King's insanity. What good can be served by the repeated dishing up of all these morbid horrors-the ȧrópónra of the sick-room, fit for nothing but professional pages-which throw in reality no light whatever either on character or events-we cannot for our own part imagine. But we make no question that this repulsive part of the work will have many and eager readers, and that Mr. Jesse is fully aware of it. The greater part of these details, we must add, is taken from that very singular repository of court gossip and dialogue behind the curtain, the late Mr. Locker's manuscript collections; with which, however, Mr. Jesse does not appear to be acquainted, except so far as Mr. Massey, to whom they were lent, thought it safe and proper to communicate them to the public in his History. These contain some important and some startling matter; much also hardly worth publication-a good deal more which is unpublishable.

We have accused Mr. Jesse of a kind of artistic rather than real credulity, and we cannot give a better instance than his treatment of the celebrated Hannah Lightfoot' story, in his second chapter. So charming a bit of sensation' biography was far too valuable to be frowned sternly away by an anecdotist. Accordingly it is treated with a mock seriousness which is worthy of the pages of Mr. G. W. Reynolds's 'Mysteries of London,' or any other of those gems of our penny literature

which gratify the taste of the largest, if not absolutely the most intelligent, class of our romance-devourers. We are told that

the father of the said Hannah, the 'fair quaker,'

a respectable tradesman, resided at Execution Dock, Wapping in the East (?), a district sufficiently remote, one would have thought, to have preserved his daughter from the temptations and perils of a Court. Unfortunately, however, she had an uncle, a prosperous linendraper, of the name of Wheeler, who resided in the more fashionable vicinities of Leicester House and St. James's Palace. The house in question-interesting, perhaps, as having been the last in which she was destined to press the pillow of innocence !-stood at the south-east corner of Carlton-street, and of what is now called Market-street.' And so on through some pages of similar rhetoric, until we are left in some doubt whether the author is not himself disposed to believe in the foolish story which he thus solemnly palms upon

He even professes a mysterious doubt whether George the Third and Hannah were not actually married, although, on his own showing, or rather that of his authorities, the marriage is reported to have been celebrated at Keith's chapel,' in Curzonstreet; and he shows himself that solemnisation in that chapel was put an end to by the Marriage Act of 1753; so that when the eventful ceremony took place the princely bridegroom (born in June, 1738) must have been somewhat under fifteen!

But the story of the seduction itself will not really bear inspection any more than that of the marriage. It took place "early in 1754,' when, therefore, the hero was under sixteen. Now, to quote at second hand from Mr. Jesse himself, it must be remembered that the Prince, sedulously trained aloof from the world— 'bigoted, young, and chaste,' as Horace Walpole terms him -was 'childish,' according to his mother, in his habits, and backward in his years' (1752), and had hitherto given no indication of an immoral tendency;' that his brother the Duke of Gloucester, many years afterwards, thus spoke of him to Hannah More: No boys were ever brought up in a greater ignorance of evil than the King and myself. At fourteen years old we retained all our native innocence.' Now, a princely lad thus trained may no doubt, in spite of mother and preceptor, become the prey of a designing woman of the world. But he does not, at fifteen, seduce the prim daughter of a respectable linendraper, carry her off, live with her some years as his mistress, and marry her to a convenient nobody. Alexander Dumas himself would hardly have ventured to insert so coarse a patch of fiction into the tapestry of history. We must on the present occasion content ourselves with adverting briefly to the curious and minute inquiry just instituted by Mr. Thoms into this tale-to his proofs that

U 2

the

the several authorities' cited by Mr. Jesse resolve themselves into the invention of one fertile brain-to the shrewd indications which he furnishes, not only that there never was any 'marriage' with Hannah Lightfoot, but that there never was any such person as Hannah Lightfoot, alias Wheeler, alias Oxford, at all that the entire story is as complete a fabrication as the Book of Mormon! Certainly, until some one can show us a single contemporary notice of this mysterious lady, or any notice whatever anterior to the year 1800, and not traceably connected in some way or other with Mrs. Olivia Wilmot Serres, we hold ourselves quite safe in provisional incredulity.

Of course Mr. Jesse does ample justice to the romantic aspect of the poor king's more authentic flirtation, his short-lived amourette with Lady Sarah Lennox: which we could never bring ourselves to regard as meaning anything more than a little shy, though honest, gallantry on the part of the youth, a little innocent scheming on that of the lady, and a little not unnatural calculation on that of some of her connections. That

exercising that admirable command over his passion which more than once distinguished him during the difficulties of his subsequent career, he resolved on rendering the gratification of his desires dependent on the interests of his subjects; and subsequently succeeded in alienating himself from her society,'-(i. 68.)

is a notion which we make over to those who have formed a very different estimate of the honest, impulsive character of the young sovereign from our own. To what subsequent' occasion Mr. Jesse refers we cannot conjecture. Surely not to the poor king's wild aberration of mind about Lady Pembroke, in the days of his insanity. That half-sad, half-ludicrous chapter of his history was first brought to notice by one or two incidental passages in the Buckingham papers, and by the extracts from the Locker manuscripts published by Mr. Massey. It is no more worth remembering than any other of the 'ægri somnia' so carefully and indecently chronicled by members of his Court. Mr. Jesse, by the way, does not appear to understand the hidden meaning of one anecdote, which he cites, having reference to this subject. The king, on more than one occasion, when under this influence, expressed in conversation his admiration for the Lutheran Church and its tenets. This puzzles Mr. Jesse, accustomed to regard him as a peculiarly orthodox son of that of England. He does not perceive the chain of thought which was forming in the poor distracted brain. The king remembered the bigamous indulgence accorded

*See Notes and Queries,' 3rd Series, vol. xi. pp. 89, seqq., 110, 8€97., 131, seqq., 196, seqq., 218, seqq.

by

by Luther to the Landgrave of Hesse, and meditated on the possible application of the precedent to himself.

We have already complained a little of the profuseness with which Mr. Jesse indulges in the often reproduced and most painful details of these dreary interregna in the king's mental sanity. On one point, however, connected with this humiliating subject, we think he deserves credit at the hands of all lovers of fair history. A great deal too much has been made of the alleged levity and recklessness of the conduct of his sons towards him in his madness of 1788: conduct which, had it really taken place as represented, would certainly have excited to a dangerous pitch of fury the feelings of society, by no means predisposed in their favour. Too much has been made, also, of the supposed brutalities exercised towards the royal sufferer by some of his palace attendants, urged on by the unfilial example.

'These facts,' says Mr. Jesse, 'are related on high authority, that authority being Elizabeth Countess Harcourt, who was not only a lady of the bedchamber to Queen Charlotte, and sister-in-law to General Harcourt who accompanied the King to Kew, but who also lived on terms of particular intimacy with their Majesties. Moreover, as regards the painful episode of the German page, Ernst, Lady Harcourt goes so far as to vouch that, after the King's recovery, she heard the story from his Majesty's own lips. Nevertheless, we cannot but think that these terrible details are greatly, though doubtless not wilfully, exaggerated. In the first place, these barbarities are stated to have commenced on the removal of the King to Kew, in the month of October, and to have lasted till the month of December, "when, happily, Dr. Willis was called in ;" thus extending the period of his Majesty's 's sufferings over several weeks. But the fact is, that instead of the King having been removed to Kew in the month of October, it was not till the 29th of November that his removal took place, and consequently, as Dr. Willis was called in so early as Friday, the 5th of December, the period is of course reduced to only six days. Moreover, considerable doubt scems to exist whether violent measures were resorted to at all, so long as the King was under the charge of his regular physicians; in fact, whether Dr. Willis. was not himself the first to advocate and to employ them. From Miss Burney, for instance, we learn that up to the date of the King's removal from Windsor, not only had there prevailed among his medical attendants the greatest disinclination to put any force upon him, lest it might be resented by him in the case of his recovery, but that "no human being dared even mention compulsion." "His smallest resistance," said Sir Lucas Pepys, "would have called up the whole country to his fancied rescue." Lady Harcourt's further account of the cruel state of isolation in which the King found himself at Kew, of the withdrawal of his faithful equerries, the hurried departure of the physicians, and the consignment of his person to mere pages and keepers-must also be

received

received with some qualification. So far, indeed, from the King having been so utterly deserted as stated by that lady, we have evidence not only that a physician, as well as either a surgeon or an apothecary, regularly slept in the palace, but that both an equerry and a groom of the bedchamber were in constant attendance.

But the most painful part of Lady Harcourt's narrative is doubtless the insolent and cowardly treatment which the defenceless King is said to have experienced in Kew Gardens at the hands of his German page, Ernst. We must at once confess that we discredit the truth of this singularly painful story.' . . . . 'No doubt, could it be clearly proved that Ernst received his dismissal at this period, some degree of credit might be claimed for Lady Harcourt's extraordinary statement. So far, however, from his having been so dismissed, the author, on searching the books in the Lord Chamberlain's department, discovered the name of "George Ernst, Esq.," registered as a Page of the Back Stairs, with a salary of 801. a year, so late as the 15th of April, 1801, when one Samuel Cox was sworn in, in his room. Not improbably Ernst may have died shortly after this date, since, on referring to the books of the Treasury, the author found that by two royal warrants, severally dated the 14th of October, 1801, a pension of 1507. a year was granted to Dorothy Ernst, widow, and a pension of 507. to Charlotte Ernst, spinster; these persons being probably the wife and daughter of George Ernst. To these evidences of the Ernst family having enjoyed the favour of royalty may be added the further fact, that some years afterwards the pension of the latter was increased to 150%.

'After all, the story of Ernst seems to be capable of easy explanation. It was one of the peculiarities attending the King's subsequent restoration to reason that, for many weeks afterwards, he found it impossible to shake off the conviction that certain things were not realities, which in fact had had no other foundation than in his own distempered fancy; and accordingly, many painful particulars that he related to Lady Harcourt were in all probability, not what had really occurred, but what he morbidly imagined had taken place. It should be mentioned that to Miss Burney, as well as to Lady Harcourt, the King represented himself as having been laid violent hands on by Ernst; but as the conversation with the former lady took place while the King's mind was still partially deranged, she seems to have attributed his conviction on the subject to what we conceive to have been the true cause—a mere illusion of his malady.'—(iii. 82-89.)

Here, however, we must part with Mr. Jesse, not without renewed thanks for the amusement which he has given us. Our more serious business is with the contribution to the authentic history of an earlier period of the king's reign afforded by Mr. Donne. Mr. Donne has for the first time printed, from the original manuscripts in Her Majesty's possession, George the Third's letters to his prime minister, Lord North, from 1768 to 1783. The answers, unfortunately, are wanting. These re

markable