It was not through parental indulgence if these boys grew to despise such innocent pursuits. Queen Charlotte taught them herself in their A B C stage: and when they were given over to tutors, the order was that they should be treated like ordinary scholars, flogged if they deserved it, and so forth. The rod seems not to have been spared on him who was to become the Lord’s anointed; and his education in the classics prospered better than his father’s. The notorious Dr. Dodd, who came to be hanged for forgery, was at one time proposed as the Prince of Wales’s tutor. He was brought up with his next brother Frederick, who, till created Duke of York, bore in boyhood the foreign title of Bishop of Osnaburgh, and had been made a Knight of the Bath in the nursery. The little Bishop did not take kindly to books; but in later life George IV. could pose as a scholar before the courtly wits about him; even in his teens he corrected his Governor, Lord Bruce, on a false quantity, so mortifying the noble pedagogue that he gave in his resignation. There is another story, perhaps recorded by Signor Ben Trovato, that in the Prince’s later life an uncourtly Provost of Eton mentioned Homer to him as “an author with whom your Royal Highness is probably not much acquainted,” to which H.R.H. suavely replied that he had forgotten a good deal of his Homer, but remembered one line, and went on to quote _Il._ i. 225, which, for readers in the same case as to Homer, may be rendered by Dryden’s version, “Dastard and drunken, mean and insolent”--epithets that too well fitted the rebuked pedant in question. The Eton boys of that day, for whom the _summum supplicium_, according to Henry Angelo’s _Memoirs_, was not over six cuts of a birch, would appear to have been handled in less Spartan fashion than were the King’s sons in their private schoolroom. The Princess Sophia told Miss Amelia Murray that she had seen her eldest brothers, at thirteen and fourteen, held by the arms to be flogged with a long whip. But once the naughty boys are said to have turned against one of their severe masters, using upon him the rod he proposed for them. This story may have suggested a scene in Thackeray’s _Virginians_, as it might have been prompted by one in _Roderick Random_, or a variant in _The Fool of Quality_, a very long and edifying romance of the Sandford and Merton school, which had a vogue at this period. The Queen held no high opinion of novel-reading; and if her sons studied the works of Smollett, it would perhaps be on the sly, as must have been a good many doings in that family.