what pleasure will every honest heart do homage to his virtues! what eye would discern faults in the splendour of such excellence! Lord Bolingbroke said of the Duke of Marlborough, "He was so great a man, that I have forgotten his faults."

It is not the abilities of Lord Chatham that his country needs so much as his integrity: INTEGRITY will soon be the virtue most sought for, most valued in public life. This prophecy should be repeatedly sounded in the ears of those, who are educating statesmen. There exists at present a set of politicians, who seem to estimate themselves and others by the number and the emoluments of the places and pensions, which they can grasp and accumulate in their family: there are men who seem to think, that the published list of their sinecures exhibits a sort of tariff of their political consequence; that intellect is of little estimation, till its produce comes to be stamped at the mint;" that character is worth, "Like ev'ry other thing,

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"Just as much money as 't will bring."

But these statesmen are an ephemeral race. These venal, vulgar motives cannot long endure. Though England is a commercial nation; and though the maxims of the trading part of the community have insensibly risen with their riches, and mixed with those of our aristocracy, yet there still exists a large portion of liberal disinterested virtue in these countries, which the great motives, and great occasions of the times must call forth to public service, and public admiration.

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CHAPTER VIII.

ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE.

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MON métier est d'être roi," said a king, who was in his day at the head of his profession. A more hazardous trade than that of a king can in the present times scarcely be named; and such is the aspect of public affairs, that probably the hazard will not be diminished for the successors of the reigning sovereigns. Consequently the rising generation of princes should be prepared for the trials, to which they may be exposed. To pretend to add any thing to what has been written by ancient and modern authors on the education of princes, might perhaps be presumptuous; to repeat what they have said, would undoubtedly be tiresome. The object therefore of the present essay is to consider what may be selected, rather than what can be amplified, in the directions of preceding authors. Not the life, nor the powers of any mortal in the ordinary course of nature could compass all that has been required of the tutors of princes to teach, or of their pupils to learn. The selecting from this mass of receipts for making a perfect prince, what are of approved utility, the noting what are indispensable, and what may be safely omitted, though an humble, will not be an ungrateful task.

To begin by stating what a king need not be. He need not be a dancer, a fiddler, a poet, a painter, an artist, an antiquary, an etymologist, a mathematician, a mechanist, or a profound scholar. He will find it useful to have some tincture of all the sciences; and it may be ornamental to him to have some acquaintance with the polite arts; but these things are not essential, nor would any or all of them constitute a great monarch. Lewis the Fourteenth, we are told, danced better than any man of his court; but, unless he had performed some more heroic actions than dancing ballets at Versailles, he would scarcely have obtained the appellation of le Grand, except from the lady', who, after having the honour of dancing a minuet with him, exclaimed, " Il faut avouer que notre roi est un grand héros." From the moment that Lewis the Fourteenth heard the following lines from Racine's Britannicus recited before him, he never danced in public.

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"Pour mérite premier, pour vertu singulière
"Il excelle à trainer un char dans la carrière,
"A disputer des prix indignes de ses mains,

"A se donner lui-même en spectacle aux Romains."

Frederick the Great played on the flute; but by all accounts he did not play so well as to need to be ashamed of it. Even the poetry of this Solomon of the North added but little to his fame as a monarch. His general taste for litera

a Lettres de Madame de Sevigné.

b Thiebault says, that Frederick's musical assistants used to complain, that it was very difficult to cover his majesty's faults; and as the blame was regularly thrown upon them, they were not desirous of performing at the royal

concerts.

ture was, indeed, a kingly accomplishment. It induced him to encourage learning and science in his country, and it tended to improve and civilize his people: but his authorship, accompanied as it was with some degree of literary jealousy, rather diminished than increased his disposition to be, what Voltaire preposterously called him, a Mœcenas!

Our Henry the Eighth was a polemic writer, and James the First was not only literary, but erudite; yet notwithstanding all the controversial skill, and all the erudition of these royal and noble authors, the one was a hateful tyrant, the other but a miserable pedant. Henry the Fourth of France, on the contrary, was notoriously deficient in, literature; he used to say, that with a chancellor who did not understand Latin, and a king who could not spell, France was tolerably well governed. His contemporaries and succeeding ages have confirmed this judgment.

the care,

that should

It is needless here to expatiate upon be taken to prevent a young prince from acquiring any vicious habits or tastes; his moral and religious education ought, in most respects, to be the same as that which should be given to every class of his subjects. Against gaming, inebriety, or any species of profligacy, it would be superfluous here to in

"O, cried the goddess, for some pedant reign!
"Some gentle James to bless the land again;
"To stick the doctor's chair into the throne,
"Give law to words, or war with words alone;
"Senates and courts with Greek and Latin rule,
"And turn the council to a grammar school."

veigh; vice in every shape ought to be made the object of a prince's abhorrence: but these are general topics; the present essay proposes to treat only of the education peculiar to the profession of a king.

The principles by which his memory, judgment, and imagination ought to be cultivated, cannot differ in any respect from those, which have been already suggested. In teaching a prince literature, the first object should be to inspire him with a desire to learn, not to cram any particular branch of knowledge down his royal throat. Peculiar care should be taken not to disgust him with instruction. He should never be reduced to the state of that little prince, who envied the beggar for not being obliged to learn Latin. We are informed by some of the private memoirs of the times, that Lewis the Thirteenth was early disgusted with literature by the awkward pedantry of his preceptors.

"Lewis XIII showed early the greatest disgust to lite"rature; a dislike which continued to the end of his life; “ and had perhaps arisen from the mistakes of his preceptors, "who had not sufficiently studied his tastes, or those suited to his age. They made him learn, as a task, the history of "his predecessors in the Antiquities of Fauchet; a book "written in the driest style, and filled with discussions that might repel the most intrepid reader.

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"The queen-mother, to cure his aversion for reading, had "him whipped one day by Monsieur de Souvrè, his governor. "The little prince resisted at first; then he said, 'Well, I