He died; and at once a new world opened.  The young King was a born Englishman.  All his tastes and habits, good or bad, were English.  No portion of his subjects had anything to reproach him with.  Even the remaining adherents of the House of Stuart could scarcely impute to him the guilt of usurpation.  He was not responsible for the Revolution, for the Act of Settlement, for the suppression of the risings of 1715 and of 1745.  He was innocent of the blood of Derwentwater and Kilmarnock, of Balmerino and Cameron.  Born fifty years after the old line had been expelled, fourth in descent and third in succession of the Hanoverian dynasty, he might plead some show of hereditary right.  His age, his appearance, and all that was known of his character, conciliated public favour.  He was in the bloom of youth; his person and address were pleasing.  Scandal imputed to him no vice; and flattery might without any glaring absurdity, ascribe to him many princely virtues.

It is not strange, therefore, that the sentiment of loyalty, a sentiment which had lately seemed to be as much out of date as the belief in witches or the practice of pilgrimage, should, from the day of his accession, have begun to revive.  The Tories in particular, who had always been inclined to King-worship, and who had long felt with pain the want of an idol before whom they could bow themselves down, were as joyful as the priests of Apis, when, after a long interval, they had found a new calf to adore.  It was soon clear that George the Third was regarded by a portion of the nation with a very different feeling from that which his two predecessors had inspired.  They had been merely First Magistrates, Doges, Stadtholders; he was emphatically a King, the anointed of heaven, the breath of his people’s nostrils.  The years of the widowhood and mourning of the Tory party were over.  Dido had kept faith long enough to the cold ashes of a former lord; she had at last found a comforter, and recognised the vestiges of the old flame.  The golden days of Harley would return.  The Somersets, the Lees, and the Wyndhams would again surround the throne.  The latitudinarian Prelates, who had not been ashamed to correspond with Doddridge and to shake hands with Whiston, would be succeeded by divines of the temper of South and Atterbury.  The devotion which had been so signally shown to the House of Stuart, which had been proof against defeats, confiscations, and proscriptions, which perfidy, oppression, ingratitude, could not weary out, was now transferred entire to the House of Brunswick.  If George the Third would but accept the homage of the Cavaliers, and High Churchmen, he should be to them all that Charles the First and Charles the Second had been.