idea that he would soon emancipate himself from Mr. Pitt. "Be a king, George," his mother used to say to him. The unsifted youth was determined, if he could, to be a king. At the time of his accession George was in his twenty-third year. He was a decidedly personable young Prince. He had the large regular features of his race, the warm complexion of good health, and a vigorous constitution, keen attractive eyes, and a firm, full mouth. He was tall and strongly made, and carried himself with a carriage that was dignified or stiff according to the interpretation of those who observed it. Many of the courtly ladies thought him extremely handsome, were eagerly gracious to him, did their best to thrust themselves upon his attention, and received, it would seem, very little notice in return for their pains. If George showed himself {4} indifferent and even ungallant to his enthusiastic admirers, his brother Edward was of a different disposition. But though Edward, like his brother, was an agreeable-looking youth, and keen to win favor in women's eyes, he found himself like Benedict: nobody marked him because he was not the heir to the throne. In some illustrated histories of the reign two portraits of George the Third are placed in immediate and pathetic contrast. The one portrait represents George as he showed in the first year of his reign--alert, young, smiling, with short-cut powdered hair, a rich flowered coat, and the star and ribbon of the Garter on his breast. So might a young king look called in the flower of his age to the control of a great country, pleased, confident, and courageous. The other picture shows how the King looked in the sixtieth year of his reign. The face is old and wrinkled and weary; the straggling white locks escape from beneath a fur-trimmed cap; the bowed body is wrapped in a fur-trimmed robe. The time of two generations of men lay between the young king and the old; the longest reign then known to English history, the longest and the most eventful. [Sidenote: 1760--George's qualifications for King] George the Third started with many advantages over his predecessors of the same name. He was an Englishman. He spoke the English language. It was his sincere wish to be above all things English. He honestly loved English ways. He had not the faintest desire to start a seraglio in England. He had no German mistresses. He did not care about fat women. He was devoted to his mother--perhaps a good deal too devoted, but even the excess of devotion might have been pardonable in the public opinion of England; certainly it was only his own weakness and perversity that made it for a while not pardonable. He was of the country squire's order of mind; his tastes were wholly those of the stolid, well-intentioned, bucolic country squire. He would probably have been a very respectable and successful sovereign if only he had not been plagued by the ambition to be a king.