followed in a general History. It is no unusual circumstance for the heir-apparent to place himself in antagonism to the reigning monarch, as the only available means of obtaining a distinct position. His small court becomes a centre of intrigue, where all the discontented spirits of the day-all the adventurers who have failed to obtain office, and who consider their merits unjustly overlooked-are certain to congregate, to agitate, and to conspire. This was especially the case during the eighteenth century, lasting even to the time of George III.,

of which it seemed impossible to forecast. He encountered all this formidable discontent with the rugged courage and domineering self-will of his nature; but the time arrived when he could do this no longer. His opposition to the Spanish War proved the cause of his overthrow. The war was unquestionably popular, and Walpole would not conceal his dislike of its objects, his distrust of its results. The Opposition acquired tremendous force; dissensions arose in the Cabinet; and Walpole begged leave to retire, but met with a direct re

and the early days of the Prince who afterwards became George IV.

Notwithstanding this opposition, however, the reign of George II. was one of the most brilliant in English history. Successful abroad on several occasions, the country still remained prosperous at home. For fifteen years after the accession of George II., Walpole continued to direct the fortunes of England. During ten of those years, he was at the very height of his power; but even the greatest of Ministers is certain, after a long term of office, to find that the combination of his secret and his open foes is more than he can withstand. Walpole had a bitter enemy in Frederick, Prince of Wales; and many leading politicians, not connected with the Government, thought that Sir Robert had established a species of Dictatorship, the duration

fusal from the King. In February, 1740, a motion was made for an address to the Crown, praying that Sir Robert Walpole might be removed from his Majesty's presence and counsels for ever. The motion was negatived by a large majority, but the Minister's triumph was only short-lived. At the next General Election, the number of Walpole's supporters was so considerably reduced that it was with great difficulty he could carry on the Government at all. On the 2nd of February, 1742, his majority dwindled to three; on the 9th he was created Earl of Orford; and on the 11th he resigned.

The Ministry which succeeded was headed by Pulteney; but Walpole, who still retained his influence with the King, contrived that the new Premier should be summoned to the House of Lords as Earl of Bath, in which position his

A.D. 1745]

influence as a political leader was reduced to the lowest point. He also managed to fill the Cabinet with Whigs, and in 1743 induced the King to raise Henry Pelham, the brother of the Duke of Newcastle, and a steady adherent of himself, to the head of the Administration. When subsequently modified, the Government comprised all the strongest politicians of the day, both Tory and Whig, and was therefore known as the Broad-bottomed Ministry. The general policy of the country, however, underwent no important modifications, and the King pursued without check those foreign projects which by many were regarded as rather German than English. The life of Walpole was not prolonged beyond the 18th of March, 1745, when he expired from the effects of a painful illness. Shortly after his retirement from office, the conduct of the late Premier during the previous ten years was made the subject of a Parliamentary inquiry, and the Committee appointed for conducting the investigation issued a report in which they charged the former Minister with having used undue influence at elections, with sanctioning grants of fraudulent contracts, and with peculation and profusion in the expenditure of the secret-service money. The charges were never satisfactorily proved; but there can be no question, as already stated, that Walpole was not the most scrupulous of politicians.

His death was followed within a few months by the rebellion of the second Pretender, Charles Edward, who acted on behalf of his father. The rising, which proved more formidable than that of thirty years earlier, was instigated by France and Spain, and favoured by some amount of popular sympathy in Scotland and the North of England. The King's troops were beaten on several occasions, and the young Pretender, marching towards London at the head of a powerful force, got as far as Derby before his career was arrested. But his progress through the English counties, as well as through the Scottish Lowlands, had proved that his cause could reckon on very little active support amongst the people. The Highlanders, out of a misplaced feeling of loyalty to one who was a mere foreigner, clung to the second Pretender's cause with a romantic devotion not unallied to heroism; but the men of English race, whether north or south of the border, did not care to hazard their lives on so precarious an issue. Lancashire, and some of the other northern counties, were known to swarm with Jacobites; yet they would not draw a sword on behalf of Charles Edward. As a theory, nothing could be more charming than what they understood by legitimate succession; but the

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national prosperity secured by Walpole was not to be thrown aside for the sake of a hare-brained alien, who masqueraded in a suit of tartan, and grimaced with pleasure when the Gaelic tribesmen hailed him as Bonnie Prince Charlie." Even amongst the Highlanders, there were some clans which declared for King George. The situation soon became desperate. At the beginning of 1746, Charles Edward fell back towards the North, and, on the 16th of April, was utterly defeated at Culloden, near Inverness, by the Duke of Cumberland, second son of the King.

Charles Edward succeeded in making his escape, after a series of romantic adventures, which showed his capacity of patient endurance, but were hardly consistent with his position as the great-grandson, through his mother, of John Sobieski. The rising was punished with much severity; but, although in some instances this severity was carried to the extreme of revenge, it is impossible to deny that an example was needed to deter such mischievous attempts in the future. In England, fifty adherents of the Pretender were hanged; the Scottish lords, Lovat, Balmerino, and Kilmarnock, were beheaded; and forty persons of rank were attainted by Act of Parliament. In the Highlands, the feudal tenures were abolished, and the hereditary jurisdictions of the chiefs were transferred to the Crown, though with a money compensation. The wearing of the tartan was forbidden by law; and in a few years the turbulent and impoverished Highlands were reduced to civilisation and order, and blessed with some degree of prosperity. The First Pretender died at Rome in 1765, and his son Charles Edward, after several years of intoxication and loose habits, expired in 1788. The brother of the latter, Henry Benedict, to whom the elder Pretender had granted the title of Duke of York, and whom the Pope afterwards made Cardinal York, was the last representative of the Royal House of Stuart. A medal is extant, dated 1788, which represents this prince in an ecclesiastical habit, with an inscription describing him as Henry IX. of Great Britain, France, and Ireland. Britain, France, and Ireland. He died at Rome in 1807; but all fear of a Stuart restoration had ceased long before that time.

Owing to frequent hostilities, the National Debt was much more than doubled during the reign of George II. Three years after the death of that sovereign, when the Seven Years' War was brought to a conclusion, the indebtedness of the nation fell little short of £139,000,000, paying interest of above £4,850,000. Before his first resignation, Walpole had submitted to Parliament a plan for reducing the interest of the National Debt,

1760-the thirty-three years during which the throne was filled by George II. The annual Parliamentary grants, which at the earlier period amounted to not more than three millions and a half, had risen at the later date to about nineteen millions. Nevertheless, the country progressed in wealth, and the additional burdens were not felt by a people whom commerce had made prosperous and contented. The period of George II. was a time of great mental activity and brilliant genius. Many of the wits and poets who had arisen under Queen Anne lasted into the reign of the second

The

were clergymen of the Church of England, and it is certain that they had at first no desire to do more than break up what they regarded as the sinful lethargy which had overspread the minds of men. The movement in time passed far beyond the borders of the Church, though not without producing a considerable effect within those borders. The truth is, that for many years a sort of placidity had prevailed in the religious life of England, which the more enthusiastic regarded as spiritual deadness. Since the collapse of the great Puritan uprising, after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, there had been no great excitement of the public mind on matters of faith. Sacheverell agitation was a mere flash in the pan, and the modern Dissenters went their ways after a quiet and unpretending 'fashion. In the Church, there was undoubtedly a great deal of worldlymindedness; in society at large, there was much that needed reformation. Yet, on the whole, we perceive a gentleness, an amenity, a sedate and cultured breadth of thought, in the first thirty or forty years of the eighteenth century, which are not undeserving of respectful remembrance. The graceful and scholarly tone of the best Churchmen for nearly a hundred years the tolerant and sympathetic leanings of such Latitudinarians as Cudworth, Whichcote, Tillotson, and others-and the grave and measured scepticism of Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury, of Tindal and Toland, of Collins and Chubb-seemed to open the prospect of a true spiritual advance into domains of thought no less reverential than rational. But the fiery enthusiasm of Wesley and Whitefield unquestionably found a response in the national heart. There were many crying abuses to be denounced, and the reformers denounced them with an acrid vehemence which burnt where it did not purify. The age of indifference, as it was called by manythough it might rather have been described as the age

of temperance and sanity-passed away before a tornado of fanaticism, the first outbreak of which was in 1738. The newly-born emotion swept like a whirlwind over all England, and embraced with equal facility the ignorance of colliers and the frivolity of peers. Nothing was so fashionable as religion. It took the place of card-parties and routs; it influenced some deeply, and many superficially. The open profligacy of high life was checked for a while; the brutality of the lower orders was briefly cowed by a moral force which drew tears from eyes unaccustomed to such moisture. The earnestness and self-devotion of Wesley and Whitefield are beyond question; and it cannot be denied that in some quarters they did substantial,

if fugitive, good. Yet they infected the blood of England with a gloomy fanaticism, which endured for two or three generations as a poison in the very depths of life.

Among the numerous Acts of Parliament which the reign of George IL added to the statute-book, one of the most remarkable was that which effected a much-needed reformation in the calendar. The arrangement made by Julius Cæsar had brought the computation of time very nearly to an exact correspondence with the motion of the earth round the sun; but the slight discrepancy had amounted, in the course of ages, to several days. In 1582, therefore, Pope Gregory XIII. corrected the error, which was by that time not merely obvious, but embarrassing. Many of the Western nations adopted the new calendar, but some of the Protestant communities ridiculously declined to receive a benefit with which religion had nothing whatever to do, because it proceeded from the Vatican. The old misleading computation lasted in England until 1752, when, by an Act passed the previous year, the calendar was brought into correct relationship with the solar system by the omission of eleven days, which the mob foolishly regarded as an actual shortening of their lives to that extent. The Eastern countries of Europe, where the Greek Church prevails, still cling to their erroneous calendar, from the same motive that once influenced some Protestants; but it is difficult to believe that even these countries will not eventually place themselves in harmony with the rest of the civilised world, and with the natural system of things.

A new province was added to the English colonies in America during the reign of George II. Until 1732, Georgia, the last-founded of the original colonies of English America, was comprised within the limits of South Carolina. The country, which afterwards received a separate name in honour of the King, and a separate organisation of a somewhat peculiar character, was a wilderness of indefinite extent, claimed by the Spaniards as a part of Florida, and by the English as a portion of the Carolinas. Neither nation did anything towards the cultivation or settlement of the land; but each valued it as a frontier. The tract lay bare and desolate, unoccupied by any white race, and but thinly peopled by Indians. Early in the reign of George II., however, it was considered a matter of importance that the desert regions of Carolina should be saved from the Spaniards, who were advancing from the south, and from the French, who were approaching from the west. An active philanthropist at length took up the question with much enthusiasm and vigour, and