There is something in the Scotch character that causes it to relish royal prerogative. To this hour there are in Scotland families that cherish a kind of sentimental attachment to the memory of the Stuarts; and we find Scotchmen as eminent as Hume, Carlyle, Lockhart, Scott, Wilson--men of distinguished liberality in some provinces of thought--unable to widen out into liberal politics. Bute was a lord as well as a Scotchman, not as ignorant nor as vulgar as lords in that generation usually were, but still subject to the lowering influences that always beset a privileged order; predisposed, too, by temperament to the worship of the picturesque, and now the cherished sharer of the shy, proud, gloomy seclusion of the family upon which the hopes of an empire were fixed. He showed them medals and pictures, he discoursed of music and architecture--two of his most pronounced tastes--and he nourished every princely prejudice which a wise tutor would have striven to eradicate. This unfortunate youth, dull offspring of the stimulated lust of ages, was an apt pupil in the Jacobin theory of kingly authority. He was caught one day reading the book written at the instance of the dethroned James II. to justify his arbitrary policy; and there were so many other signs of the heir to a constitutional throne being educated in unconstitutional principles that Horace Walpole drew up a formal remonstrance against it in the name of the Whig families. This document, which was privately circulated, produced no effect. _Sois roi!_ That remained the ruling thought in the mind of this ignorant, proud, moral young man, about to fill a place which conferred more obstructive power than any other in the world. If he had only been dissolute in that most dissolute age, he could have been ruled through his vices; but being strictly moral and temperate, he was, alas! always _himself_; and he had at his back the great voiceless multitude, who know by instinct that morality is the first interest of civilized human nature, and who honor it supremely even in this crude, rudimentary form. "Your dad is safe on his throne," said some boon companion of George IV., "as long as he is faithful to that ugly old woman, your mother." And wise old Franklin said, "If George III. had had a bad private character and John Wilkes a good one, he might have turned the king out of his dominions." Such is the mighty power of the mere indispensable rudiments of virtue, its mere preliminary corporeal conditions. A chaste and temperate fool will carry the day nine times in ten over profligate genius.