If GEORGE THE THIRD was, in respect to his parts, only slenderly endowed, he had in another respect large gifts. Both his industry and his power of sustained application were uncommon. And his conscientious sense of responsibility for the use of such abilities as he had was no less remarkable. Whatever may have been his mistakes in government, no man ever sat on the British throne who was more thoroughly honest in his intentions, or more deeply anxious to show, in the discharge of his duties, his consciousness of being ‘Ever in his great taskmaster’s eye.’ That his public acts did not more adequately correspond with his good desires was due, in large measure, to an infelicitous parentage and a narrow education. As the father of lies sometimes speaks truth, so a mere party manifesto may sometimes give sound advice, though clothed in a discreditable garb. [Sidenote: THE EDUCATION OF GEORGE III, AFTER THE DEATH OF FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES.] When public attention came first to be attracted to the character of the peculiar influences which began to mould the training of the young Prince of WALES soon after his father’s death, a Court Chamberlain received, one morning, by the post, an unsigned document, which he thought it his duty to place in the hands of the Prime Minister, and he, when he had read it, thought the paper important enough to be laid before the King. This anonymous memorial denounced, as early as in the winter of 1752 (when the Prince was but fourteen years old), the sort of education which GEORGE THE THIRD was receiving as being likely to initiate an unfortunate reign. The paper (which I have now before me) is headed: ‘_A Memorial of several Noblemen and Gentlemen of the first rank_,’ and in the course of it there is an assertion—as being already matter of public notoriety—‘that books inculcating the worst maxims of government, and defending the most avowed tyrannies, have been put into the hands of the Prince of Wales,’ and such a fact, it is said, ‘cannot but affect the memorialists with the most melancholy apprehensions when they find that the men who had the honesty and resolution to complain of such astonishing methods of instruction are driven away from Court, and the men who have dared to teach such doctrines are continued in trust and favour.’[12] [Sidenote: _A Memorial_, &c.; MS. ADDIT. 6271, fol. 3.] Making all allowance for partisan feeling and for that tinge of Whig oligarchism which peeps out, as well in the very title, as in the contents of this ‘Memorial,’ there was obvious truth in the denunciation, and a modicum of true prophecy in the inference. But such a remonstrance had just as little effect, in the way of checking undue influences, as it had of wisdom in the form given to it, or in the mode of its presentation at Court. [Sidenote: NARROW RANGE OF GEORGE THE THIRD’S TASTES FOR BOOKS.]