[330] _The Gentleman's Magazine_, January 5, 1816. During his last years George III was subject to harmless and not unpleasing delusions. "The good King's mania consists in pleasant errors of the mind,"[331] said Lady Jerningham; and this statement was confirmed by Princess Elizabeth: "If anything can make us more easy under the calamity which it has pleased God to inflict on us, it is the apparent happiness that my revered father seems to feel."[332] He found much comfort in religion, and on one occasion declared, "Although I am deprived of my sight, and am shut out from the society of my beloved family, yet I can approach my Blessed Lord," and thereupon administered to himself the Sacrament.[333] Indeed, he was unhappy only when he could not have his favourite dinner of cold mutton and salad, plover's eggs, stewed peas, and cherry tart; and fearful--he who in his senses had never known fear--only when it was proposed to shave his beard. "If it must be," he said, "I will have the battle axes called in."[334] [331] _Jerningham Letters, February 14, 1817._ [332] Galt: _George III, His Court and Family_. [333] _Georgiana._ [334] _Lord Carlisle's Reminiscences._ [Illustration: GEORGE III IN HIS STUDY _To face p. 287, Vol. II_] The King loved to wander through the corridors, a venerable figure with long silvery beard, attired in a silk morning gown and ermine night cap, holding imaginary conversations with ministers long since dead, "rationally as to the discourse, but the persons supposed present"; and so pleasantly did he while away the time that sometimes his dinner was ready before he expected it. "Can it be so late?" he would ask. "_Quand on s'amuse le temps vole._"[335] He was fully convinced that Princess Amelia--"my poor Am"--was alive and happy at Hanover, enjoying perennial youth and beauty; and believed that he was prosecuting an amorous intrigue with Lady Pembroke, whom he often believed to be his wife, and whose absence angered him. "Is it not a strange thing, Adolphus," he said to the Duke of Cambridge, "that they still refuse to let me go to Lady Pembroke, although every one knows I am married to her; but what is worse, that infamous scoundrel Halford was at the marriage, and has now the effrontery to deny it to my face."[336] He considers himself no longer an inhabitant of this world, and often, when he had played one of his favourite tunes, observes that he was very fond of it when he was in the world. He speaks of the Queen and all his family, and hopes they are doing well now, for he loved them very much when he was with them," Princess Elizabeth remarks, and the belief that he was dead was one of his regular delusions. "I must have a new suit of clothes, he said one day, "and I will have them black in memory of George the Third, for he was a good man."[337] [335] _Ibid._ [336] _Buckingham Memoirs._ [337] _Relics of Royalty._