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We have treated this episodical matter somewhat at length, because it forms an important element in the history of the first twenty-five years of George III.'s reign, and because the allusions to it in all the speeches of the time are not only frequent, but violent and acrimonious. We now resume our summary of the history of the period which preceded the formation of Lord North's Ministry. Of Grenville's Administration it has been said that it was on the whole, the worst ' which has governed England since the Revolution.' It was signalised by outrages on the liberty of the people and outrages on the dignity of the Crown.' To us it appears the severest trial to which the King, whose life was full of trials, was subjected. Later in his reign the King had to contend with many misfortunes; with unsuccessful and costly wars; with national distress and national discontent; with the gigantic resources of powerful enemies and the half-hearted friendship of crippled and desponding allies. But in those days he had sympathies and consolations which now were wanting to him. He had in succession two Ministers on whose personal friendship and devotion he could implicitly rely; he had the regard and esteem of the middle classes of the country; he had the advantage of a character at last well known and understood. But during the Grenville Administration he had none of those consolations. His chief Minister was not cordial, or sympathetic, or devoted; but cold, formal, stern, and dictatorial. His people were as yet strangers to his own character and believed the worst of him. Every ministerial act that was obnoxious and unpopular was vulgarly attributed to the despotic schemes of the King; and the King was believed to be held in leading strings by his mother and Lord Bute. The first outburst of the protracted storm commenced with the publication of what Burke called that 'spiritless, though virulent, performance, at once vapid and sour,' No. 45 of the 6 North Briton,' and the agitation about General Warrants. The war between Wilkes and the Government was destined to last seven years; seven years of successive humiliation for the Government, and of triumph to the most impudent and scurrilous of demagogues. This was the first fruits of Grenville's indiscretion, and was near being his last. A sense of the feelings of the Cabinet induced the King to consider the expediency of dismissing his Ministers. Bute suggested an application to Pitt, and, as we have before remarked, the Duke of Bedford came up to London to make the same suggestion at the same time. Pitt was sent for. He had three interviews with the King; but they were fruitless. Pitt insisted on

bringing in certain colleagues, who were intolerable to the King. The King said his honour was concerned; Pitt withdrew, and the negotiation was at an end. Grenville, of course, remained in office, and began his new reign by lecturing the King on the ascendancy of Bute. He was not long before he embarked on a fresh sea of troubles. The House of Lords addressed the Crown with a view to prosecute the author of the scandalous Essay on Woman.' The House of Commons was equally vigorous against the author of the scurrilous 'North Briton.' The Grenville Ministry pitted Parliament and Government against John Wilkes. The moral effect of such strategy it should not have been difficult to prognosticate. Well did Chesterfield write, after the duel into which Wilkes had been hurried by his personalities against Martin :

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'It is a great mercy that Mr. Wilkes, the intrepid defender of our rights and liberties, may live to fight and write again in defence of them; and it is no less a mercy that God has raised up the Earl of Sandwich to vindicate and promote true religion and morality! These two blessings will justly make an epoch in the annals of this country.'

It was indeed an epoch in the annals of the country. But its interest is tame and transitory compared with that other epoch which is eternally associated with Grenville's name; the epoch at which he proposed his too famous Resolutions to tax the American Colonies. While he was thus raising the popular spirit of England against the Government, and the popular spirit of the Colonists against England, he was disobliging the Sovereign by stinting him in matters most intimately affecting his dignity and comfort. On the spot where Buckingham Palace now stands, the Queen's House then stood. The ground which is covered by Grosvenor Place and the palatial squares of Belgravia was marsh and swamp where sportsmen shot wild ducks. It was considered necessary for the privacy of the Palace to include some acres of this ground in the Royal demesnes. 20,000l. was the price demanded. But Grenville's uncourtly parsimony forbade him to ask this small sum for the purpose; a parsimony which has condemned every succeeding Sovereign to the discomfort of inhabiting, and London to the discredit of possessing, a palace which can be overlooked from the attics of a row of adjacent houses. It was not, we believe, any deliberate intention to cause discomfort to the Royal Family which induced Grenville to decline asking Parliament for the requisite grant. Rather it was a desire to exalt the House of Commons, to show its constitutional control over the public purse, in fact to exemplify its power over the Court

in the same way as he wished to exemplify its power over theColonies by taxing America. On the constitutional right of the House of Commons to refuse a grant for buying grounds to improve the King's palace there could be as little doubt as there was on its constitutional right to tax the dependencies of the kingdom. But if Grenville could only have persuaded himself that the highest political wisdom often consists in not pushing a constitutional right to its extreme point, how different would have been the present aspect of London and the present. relations of England to America! On a subsequent occasion a severer wound was inflicted on the King's feelings by the studied omission of his mother's name from the Regency Bill.. The omission was ultimately repaired, and Grenville assumed credit to himself for having repaired it; but the King can hardly have been ignorant or forgetful of the part which he had played during the passage of the Bill through Parliament. The impression made on the King's mind by the transaction— an impression the more profound in consequence of one of those mental attacks which he had lately suffered no doubt led him to seek again to change his Ministry. The openness of his intention brought upon him one of those insulting reprimands from the Duke of Bedford, which, however they may have been justified at the time by the supposed influence of Lord Bute,. would require some far greater reason to justify them in our time. As a comment on this suspicion, it is as well to add that the attack on Bedford House by a mob of Spitalfield weavers, who were irritated by a sensible speech of the Duke's against protective duties, was devoutly believed by the great Whig leaders to have been instigated by Lord Bute! The negotiation, how

which the King had entrusted to the Duke of Cumberland broke down, through a misunderstanding or coolness between those two strange personages, Pitt and his brother-in-law Lord Temple; whose wayward caprices and inconsistencies seem to typify the relations of other and inferior statesmen of that day, and to supersede, in no small degree, the necessity of explaining the dislocation of parties and administration by any systematic intrigues or adroit manoeuvres of the King himself. But a Ministry at once unpopular with the country and with the Court could not last, and eventually the Marquis of Rockingham undertook the task which Pitt had declined. About a year was sufficient to overthrow a Cabinet which was tottering in its very commencement, but which deserves well of history for having succeeded in repealing the Stamp Act. Application was again made to Pitt, who this time condescended to afford his aid, though unaccompanied by the co-operation of Lord Temple.

Pitt himself declined to take the ostensible post of First Minister, to which the Duke of Grafton was appointed; but in lieu of that became Privy Seal, and shortly after, Earl of Chatham. In this Ministry it was that Lord North first took office, and first brought himself under the favourable notice of the King. The history of the Duke of Grafton's Administration is the history of the Duke of Grafton's distresses and anxieties, caused by the discontent in America, the contests with Wilkes, the savage onslaughts of Junius, and, not least, the illnesses, caprices, and finally the opposition of Chatham. With clouds gathering in every part of the political horizon, with London in a state of half-sedition, with his own Chancellor and his late colleague speaking against him in the House of Lords, it is not surprising that a man of the Duke of Grafton's luxurious and indolent habits should have preferred obscurity to power. He had doubtless long desired to resign office; and this desire received its final impulse when Charles Yorke, his new Chancellor, met with his mysterious and awful end. The Duke's Administration broke up; but not before it had, by Charles Townsend's scheme of tea duties, undone all the good which the Rockingham Government had effected by repealing the Stamp Act.

Lord North assumed the post of Prime Minister in January 1770. His was the seventh Ministry which the first ten years. of the King's reign saw. It was the stormiest and the gloomiest of the seven. When he became Premier the exasperation of the American Colonies had just been raised beyond its former height by the ill-judged resolution of Parliament, on the motion of the Duke of Bedford, to revive against the colonists an obsolete statute of Henry VIII., and to bring over American prisoners for trial by the English courts. On the very day when he brought before Parliament the ministerial proposal for a duty on the importation of tea into America, occurred the first affray in which blood was shed, between American subjects and English soldiers at Boston. The lull that succeeded in America was accompanied by commotions in England. The popularity and persecution of Wilkes were successfully arrayed against the Court and the Ministry. For the first time in recent history, a Lord Mayor of London, at the head of a City deputation, answered his sovereign on the throne in terms of resentful remonstrance. When the storm lulled in England, it broke out afresh in America. First came the dismissal of Franklin from office, and the devotion of that keen and angry spirit to the revolutionary cause-then the Boston Tea Riots -then the fatal conflict at Lexington-then the battle of

Bunker's Hill-then ineffectual attempts at reconciliation on either side-and then the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Next followed the alliance between France and America, the capitulation of Burgoyne, and an alternation of successes on either side, until the surrender of Cornwallis rendered the prolongation of the struggle hopeless and odious. The vicissitudes of failure and success which intervened between the capitulation of Burgoyne and the capitulation of Cornwallis were not relieved by any brilliant events in the domestic administration of the country. During the greater part of Lord North's Ministry, the Opposition in Parliament was angry, vehement, and eloquent, while out of Parliament many parts of the country, and especially the city of London, resounded with murmurs, remonstrances, and complaints. The spirit which had been kindled by Beckford and fanned by Chatham was not extinguished. Public meetings were held in Westminster, in Yorkshire, and other places, to denounce the conduct of the Government. At last, when the news of Cornwallis's surrender had been received, and the Opposition continued to repeat motion after motion condemnatory of the prosecution of the war, Lord North succeeded in persuading the King to accept his resignation, and startled the House on the evening on which Lord Surrey was to bring forward a motion more stringent than any which preceded it, by the announcement that his Administration was at an end.

The character of the man who held the helm of the State during this troublous period is worthy of contemplation. There were many conditions which it was bound to fulfil, and in Lord North they were fulfilled. It was necessary that the Minister should command the respect of the House of Commons, while he conciliated the confidence of the King. The King had struggled against the domination of the Grenvilles and the Bedfords. He longed for a Minister who would at least show deference to his rank and consideration for his feelings. Such a Minister he found in Lord North, who had been brought up with him in childhood, and acted with him in boyish theatricals. Mr. Massey says, 'The difficulty was to find any public man of character who would accept office on the King's terms; the 'first condition upon which every Minister had hitherto insisted being the expulsion of the King's friends.' It is likely enough that North put the influence of the King's friends at its proper value, and knew that no personal relations between the sovereign and any number of private individuals could outweigh the influence of a Minister who was powerful in the House of Commons. And this second qualification North