On the 25th of October news was brought to the Prince of Wales that his grandfather was dead. It was an event which must have been for some time expected, and George III. and his friends were prepared for it. His training had been somewhat peculiar. The Princess of Wales, his mother, had kept him much secluded, and his education had been chiefly withdrawn from the hands of the distinguished men whom the King had given him as governors, and intrusted to sub-preceptors of the Princess's own choosing. Her constant friend and adviser in this and other family matters had been Lord Bute, who had thereby acquired the greatest influence over the young King. It was understood that henceforth his advice would chiefly regulate the policy of the Crown. His influence and that of the teachers he had selected, some of them it is believed nominated by Bolingbroke, had all tended politically in one direction, so much so that complaints had been made, though uselessly, to the late King of the unconstitutional precepts which his heir was being taught. The views with which the young Prince's mind was filled were those which Bolingbroke had developed in "The Patriot King." The beneficent rule of a powerful monarch governing his people by his own will, but for their good, was the ideal he had been taught to set before him. It was pointed out to him that since 1688 the will of the sovereign had been held captive by that great Whig party which had produced the Revolution and secured the Hanoverian succession. And it had been impressed upon him that it was his duty to free the prerogative from this state of servitude, and to annihilate party government by restoring to the Crown its freedom of choice and action. It was with the deliberate intention of carrying out this plan that the King began his reign. Nor was the plan, had it been properly executed, either impossible or unjust. It was felt that the old party divisions were in fact obsolete, that Whig and Tory, in the sense of Hanoverian and Jacobite, were things of the past; and that it was highly detrimental to the public service that able and loyal men should be excluded from all share of the Government because, very frequently on only hereditary grounds, they belonged to a party opposed to the great Whig connection. Yet such had been the case. Parliamentary contests had, till Pitt's accession to power, been nothing but greedy struggles for place and power between two sections of the Whig party which had separated in 1716. Had the King made use of his present popularity, and of that advantage which he possessed over his predecessors in his English birth, to exercise his prerogative of choice in selecting eminent men from all parties for his ministry, and had he taken for his chief minister a man who stood well with the nation, the feeling of the country would almost certainly have gone with him. Unfortunately his somewhat narrow intellect and his restricted education