It may be here objected that Cromwell was neither a royal nor an imperial joker. He was nevertheless sovereign master of England, and as despotic as any of them. We place him among them for much the same reason which Richardson, the painter, gave to Queen Caroline, when she went to see Richardson’s series of portraits of English kings, and seeing Cromwell’s portrait among them, angrily asked how _he_, who was no king, was placed in such company. ‘He was no king, indeed, madam,’ said Richardson, ‘but it is good for kings to have him among them.’ George the Second was not a humourist, but he would have made a first-rate actor of ‘genteel comedy’ had not fate cast him for another line of characters in the drama of life. Shortly after his accession he commanded a play at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The house was full, but as the king kept it waiting, the murmurs of their displeasure fell upon his ear as he entered his box, three-quarters of an hour behind time. As he caught the unwelcome sounds he turned to Mr. Rich, the manager, who waited on him, as if he might gather from that official some explanation of the phenomenon. The greatest of the intellectual harlequins of England honestly told the king that his majesty was late, and that the audience did not seem to like it. Whereupon the sovereign assumed the air of an unrighteously suspected prince. He advanced to the front of his box, took out his watch with the apparent conviction that it was an arbitrator which would render him justice, and looking upon it, saw that it showed the time which he knew it to be. _Then_ he appeared in a change of character. He gazed at the audience with an expression bespeaking a guilty but a repentant prince. He put himself as much outside of his box as the laws of balancing would allow, and shaking his wigged head and very much powder out of it, he laid his jewelled hand on the heart side of his sky-blue velvet coat, and made a bow to the house, so superb in its apologetic pantomime that the audience burst forth into hilarious hurrahing and applauding, and all other possible symptoms, to demonstrate their gladness and to express their consent to a full reconciliation of prince and people. The Thespian element was very strong too in the eldest son of George the Third. If the first gentleman in Europe had not been born a prince he might have made a very good livelihood as an actor. High or low comedy, it would have been all the same to a player of such versatility. He could have played Rover like Elliston, and his imitations were as good as Mr. Toole’s. The best-wigged prince in Christendom has, fortunately, had an historian who makes record of his royal hero in the histrionic part of his profession. Raikes is the chronicler, but the Duke of Wellington was the fountain of intelligence.