was certain, if the reigning prince were removed, the true king (meaning the Pretender) might be restored without bloodshed. He offered to invite his majesty home; and on his arrival, promised to smite the usurper in his palace. He owned the chance of his suffering a cruel death; and that he might the better support it, desired to receive the holy sacrament daily until he made the attempt. Leake, much alarmed, carried the letter to a magistrate, and Shepherd was apprehended. He gloried in his design, and said it had been three years in his contemplation. On his trial he disdained to make any defence, but owned the truth of the charge, and declared he died a willing martyr to his principles. At the place of execution, he was publicly absolved by Arne, a nonjuring priest, and died with great firmness. His political fanaticism seems to have amounted so clearly to positive insanity, that a cell in a madhouse would have been much more proper for him than a halter at Tyburn. Few circumstances, in the reign of George the First, were more remarkable than the formation and bursting of the South Sea bubble. On the 7th of April, 1720, an act was passed, investing the South Sea Company with power to take in, by purchase and subscription, both the redeemable and unredeemable debts of the nation, to the amount of thirty-three millions, at such rates as should be settled between the company and the respective proprietors. In return, the company consented that the interest on their original capital of nine millions four hundred thousand pounds, as well as the interest on the public debt, should, after Midsummer, 1727, be reduced to four per cent, and be redeemable by parliament. Exclusive of this reduction, the company were to pay into the exchequer four years and a half purchase of all the long and short annuities that should be subscribed, and one year's purchase of such long annuities as should not be subscribed; amounting to seven millions sterling: for raising which sum they were empowered to open books of subscription, to grant redeemable annuities, and to convert the money so raised into additional stock. The dangers of the project soon appeared: a wild spirit of speculation seized the whole nation;

the successive subscriptions filled with amazing rapidity; and the directors declared a dividend of thirty per cent. for Christmas, 1720, and fifty per cent. for the next twelve years. The transfer price of stock rose, in a very short time, from one hundred and thirty to one thousand; so that those who were in the secret of the plot, were enabled to realize vast fortunes before the bubble burst. In a few months the stock fell with greater rapidity than it had risen; and the victims, awaking from their golden dreams, found themselves reduced to a deplorable state of distress and ruin. The king, being in Germany when this catastrophe happened, was sent for, express, to discuss with his ministers, the means of quelling the disturbances it had occasioned, and of restoring public credit which it had almost destroyed. A committee of the house of commons proceeded, with great diligence, to investigate this disastrous affair, which was styled, in the report, a train of the deepest villany and fraud, hell ever contrived for the ruin of any nation. It appeared, that a great number of the parliamentary supporters of the bill had been bribed by its unprincipled projectors; and the profits of the company were found to amount to thirteen millions. Some of the guilty parties were heavily mulcted, and many judicious steps were taken to relieve their dupes; but the public credit had sustained an injury which it did not recover for many years. It is curious that France had but just recovered from the effect of a similar misfortune, in the rise and fall of the Mississippi Company, projected by the famous Law.

In 1721, a bill was proposed for the suppression of blasphemy, which enacted, that words spoken against the being of God, the divinity of Christ, or the Holy Ghost, or the doctrine of the Trinity, should be punished, by imprisonment, for an indefinite term, unless the offender would renounce his error; but, after various animated debates, it was rejected. In the same session, provision was made for paying off a debt of £550,000, on the civil list, which had been incurred by the profligate expenditure of some of the ministers. The king, however, declared it to be his intention to cause a re

trenchment to be made in all his future expenses.

În 1722, the partisans of the Pretender began once more to bestir themselves in his favour, on the supposition, doubtless, that the shock produced by the failure of the South Sea project would be favourable to their designs. The measures of government, however, were at once so judicious and prompt, that the conspiracy was crushed in embryo. Several noblemen were arrested on suspicion: Bishop Atterbury was exiled for life; but only one person, Christopher Layer, a barrister of the Temple, suffered capital punishment. He was convicted of high treason, in enlisting men for the service of the Pretender. At this period, a very disgraceful tax of £100,000 was levied on the estates of Roman Catholics.

In 1725, a royal message was delivered to parliament, requiring the sum of £500,000, to discharge the debts of the civil list. This enormous arrear had been incurred in the short space of three years; because, as the message stated, his majesty had found it impossible to make any considerable retrenchments. The nation were amazed at this demand, but the money was voted by a large majority.

In May, 1725, George the First revived the ancient Order of the Bath, which had lain dormant since the coronation of Charles the Second, and celebrated the installation of the new knights, with great pomp, in Westminster Abbey.

In January, 1726, the King encountered a violent storm at sea, on his return from his yearly visit to Hanover; he was in great danger for two days, and landed, with extreme difficulty, at Rye, in Sussex. It would be difficult to give a stronger proof of his attachment to the electorate, than the alacrity he displayed in hastening to his beloved country the moment he could detach himself from the burthen of public business. These visits naturally excited discontent in England, and produced several satirical effusions against the monarch, his ministers, and his mistresses; among which, was a poem entitled The Regency, written by Samuel, brother of the celebrated John Wesley. Of this production, which appears to have obtained more notice

than it deserved, the following is a specimen :

As soon as the wind it came fairly about,
That kept the king in, and his enemies out,
He determined no longer confinement to bear,
And thus to the duchess his mind did declare:
Quoth he, my dear Kenny, I've been tired a long
while,

With living obscure in this poor little isle ;
And now Spain and Pretender have no more mines to
spring,

I'm resolved to go home and live like a king.

The duchess, in reply, approves of the monarch's intentions; and after ludicrously describing the Regency, by which the kingdom was to be governed during his absence, she says,

On the whole, I'll be hang'd, if all over the realm, There are thirteen such fools to be put to the helm; So for this time be easy, nor have jealous thought, They hav'n't sense to sell you, nor are worth being bought.

'Tis for that (quoth the King, in very bad French,) I chose them for my Regents, and you for my

wench;

And neither, I'm sure, will my trust e'er betray,
For the devil won't take you, if I turn you away.

Notwithstanding the danger which had attended his return from Germany in 1726, in the following summer, although now an old man, the king determined on visiting his electorate. He, accordingly, embarked at Greenwich on the 3rd of June, and landed in Holland on the 7th. In the progress of his journey, he was attacked with a kind of lethargic paralysis, which he foresaw would be speedily mortal, and exclaimed to his attendant, "I am a dead man." But his desire to reach his electoral capital was so great, that he caused himself to be carried on to Osnaburg. Having lost all sense and motion on his arrival at that place, his further progress was impossible; and he died on the 11th of June, 1727, in the sixty-eighth year of his age, and the thirteenth of his reign. He was buried at Hanover, on the 3rd of the following September.

The person of the king, says Walpole, is as perfect in my memory as if I saw him but yesterday: it was that of an elderly man, rather pale, and exactly like his pictures and coins; not tall, of an aspect rather good than august, with a dark tie wig, a plain coat, waistcoat and breeches, of snuff-coloured cloth, with stockings of the same colour, and a blue riband over all.

In his old age, the king was guilty

Dr. Younger being suspected of toryism; and they sent him an official discharge. The king soon missed him, and asked what had become of his little dean. "He is dead, sir," was the reply. "Dead!" said his majesty, "I am sorry for it, for I meant to have done something for him." Shortly after, the king went a progress into the west of England, and, among other places, visited Salisbury; where, perceiving Dr. Younger in the cathedral, he called to him eagerly, and said, "My little dean, I am glad to see you alive; they told me you were dead: but where have you been all this time, and what has prevented my seeing you as usual?" The doctor replied, that he had been dismissed from his office; and that, after he had received an official letter, stating that the king had no further occasion for his services, he thought that it would have ill become him to have given his majesty any further trouble. "Oh!" said the king, warmly, "I perceive how this matter is; but," added he, with an oath, "you shall be the first bishop that I will make." It happened, however, that Dr. Younger died before any of the bishops, so that he was not benefited by his sovereign's intentions.

Such a barefaced imposition, as is recorded in the foregoing anecdote, would scarcely have been practised, even on such a king as George the First, had he understood the language of this country; his knowledge of which, up to the last day of his life, was exceedingly limited. Prince William, afterwards Duke of Cumberland, when a child, being carried to his grandfather on his birth-day, the king asked him at what hour he rose. "When the chimney-sweepers go about," replied the child. Vat is de chimneysveep?" inquired the king.

"Have you been so long in England," said the boy, "and do not know what chimneysweepers are? Why," continued he, pointing to Lord Finch, afterwards Earl of Winchelsea, who was a remarkably swarthy man, "they are like that man there." Sir Robert Walpole, says Lord Oxford, governed George the First in Latin, his majesty not speaking English, and his ministers no German, nor even French.

The king is said to have possessed some relish for humour. He derived

amusement even from the coarse drolleries, by which his predilection for the electorate was held up to ridicule by the poetasters of the day. He once jocosely asked Doctor Savage why, during his long stay in Rome, he did not convert the pope. "Because, sir," replied the doctor," I had nothing better than the papacy to offer his holiness.” In the early part of this reign, a gentleman, living in the city, had been several times brought before the council, on suspicion of Jacobitism, but nothing conclusive could be proved against him. When the rebellion broke out, the suspected person wrote to the secretary of state, intimating, that, as of course, at such a critical period, he should be apprehended on a charge of Jacobitism, he begged the favour of being arrested in the course of a day or two,-for in the following week he intended going into Devonshire. The king, on being asked what he would have done with this individual, replied, "Poh! poh! there can be but little harm in one who writes so pleasantly."

About a year before the king's own death, that of his unfortunate consort, the Princess of Zell, took place and her royal husband, most iniquitously, caused her will, together with that of her father, the Duke of Zell, to be burnt; in order, as it was believed, to deprive his own son, the Prince of Wales, of some important bequests. Walpole declares, that he had this fact from Queen Caroline.

A female fortune-teller had warned George the First to take care of his wife, as he would not survive her a year; and the king gave such credit to the prediction, that, on the eve of his last departure to the continent, he took leave of his son, and the Princess of Wales, with tears, telling them that he should never see them more. It was certainly his own fate that melted him, says Walpole, not the thought of quitting for ever two persons he hated. He did his son the justice to say, "Il est fougueux, mais il a de l'honneur;" but for Caroline, he termed her, to his confidants, "Cette diablesse, madame la princesse !"

About the same period, in a tender mood, he promised the Duchess of Kendal, that if she survived him, and it were possible for the departed to

return to this world, he would make her a visit. The duchess, on his death, so much expected the accomplishment of this engagement, that a large raven, or some black fowl, flying into one of the windows of her villa, at Isleworth, she was persuaded it was the soul of her departed monarch, so accoutred, and received and treated it with great respect and tenderness.

Among the few acts of munificence, or intercession on behalf of the unfortunate, attributed to George the First, are the following:-Dining at Guildhall with the Lord Mayor, a few days after his coronation, he ordered £1000 to be paid into the hands of the sheriffs, for the relief and discharge of poor debtors. In 1718, several galley slaves, who had been condemned solely for their religion, were liberated at Marseilles, owing to his urgent representations; and during the royal progress in 1722, he gave orders for releasing many criminals, and all the prisoners confined for debt in the gaols of the towns through which he passed, at his own expense. In 1724, he sent a letter to each of the Universities, declaring his intention to establish professorships of modern history, with a yearly salary of £400 each: and he further ordered, that his almoner should select twenty-four preachers, from the two Universities, to officiate, alternately, in the chapel at Whitehall, with a stipend of thirty pounds a year

each.

Notwithstanding he professed never to forsake a friend, to endeavour to do justice to every person, and not to fear any man, on the whole, this monarch's character was the reverse of admirable. With scarcely one positive virtue, he possessed numerous vices. His youth was profligate, his manhood unprincipled, and his old age libidinous. He was upon bad terms with his mother; inflicted the most irreparable injuries on his wife; and treated his only son with malicious harshness. Although he is reported to have said to a German nobleman, who had congratulated him on being sovereign of Great Britain and Hanover, "Rather congratulate me on having such a subject as Newton in the one, and as Leibnitz in the other;" and notwithstanding his foundation of the professorships of modern history,-his donation

of the Bishop of Ely's library, which cost him six thousand guineas, to the University of Cambridge, the inclination he exhibited, but which was, it appears, thwarted by his ministers, to present Desaguliers with a valuable living,--and the notice with which he honoured Vertue, on that artist having engraved his portrait, from a picture by Kneller, George the First evidently possessed no taste, either for literature or science. If genius flourished during his reign, it was not on account of royal patronage. His military talents appear to have been respectable; and the manner in which he managed his electorate before he became King of England, was highly creditable to his judgment. Toland says, in a pamphlet published about the year 1705, I need give no more particular proof of his frugality in laying out the public money, than that all the expences of his court, as to eating, drinking, fire, candles, and the like, are duly paid every Saturday night; the officers of his army receive their pay every month, and all the civil list are cleared every half year. He was greatly annoyed by the want of confidence in his economy, displayed by his British subjects; lamenting to his private friends that he had left his electorate to become a begging king; and adding, that he thought it very hard to be constantly opposed in his application for supplies, which it was his intention to employ for the benefit of the nation.

The various treaties in which he engaged, are so numerous and uninteresting, that it would be needlessly trespassing on the reader's patience, to detail the whole of them. The chief objects of his foreign policy seem to have been the enlargement of his electoral dominions, and the counteraction of attempts threatened, or made, by continental powers, in favour of the Pretender. After having entered into treaties of defensive alliance with France, Holland, and the Emperor, in 1715 he purchased, from Denmark, the Duchies of Bremen and Verden, which that power had conquered from Sweden. One of the articles of this bargain was, that George the First, as Elector of Hanover, should declare war against the Swedish monarch, Charles the Twelfth; who, on his part, formed an