King had given much attention to this affair; and had he availed himself of those frequent opportunities for conversation which his official business threw in his way, he might (to use a metaphor) have borrowed his Master's observation glass, if he had lost his own.—The frivolity of the logic from the opposite side (that is the Treasury benches, where the strength of the enemy lay) it seems was such, that Mr. Burke scarcely preserves good manners in adverting to it; and declines to reply in detail to—what the reporters did not think of sufficient importance for their purpose. He assumes, exactly as the King had done, that no man of common sense, if disinterested, could entertain a doubt on the question, yet probably he did not know half the reasons on which George 3rd had formed that conclusion.
As the salutary forms of the constitution, though intended only to circumscribe bad, or weak princes, yet unavoidably also limit the sphere of action of the good; of whom the Author of Cato observes, "it would be happy for their subjects, if they were absolute;" so in the interval from February to May, or, it is more likely, from Christmas, this ornament to the throne is seen addressing himself, every Tuesday,[1] to all that minuteness of investigation,
- ↑ Sir Nathaniel W. Wraxall has given us an abstract of the tiresome routine of a drawing-room day, which would be enough to show that the kingly office was not a sinecure in the reign of George 3rd.
It is a fact that during many years of his life, after coming
