attractive, whatever is most seductive, has always been offered to the Prince of Wales of the day, and always will be.  It is not rational to expect the best virtue where temptation is applied in the most trying form at the frailest time of human life.  The occupations of a constitutional monarch are grave, formal, important, but never exciting; they have nothing to stir eager blood, awaken high imagination, work off wild thoughts.  On men like George III., with a predominant taste for business occupations, the routine duties of constitutional royalty have doubtless a calm and chastening effect.  The insanity with which he struggled, and in many cases struggled very successfully, during many years, would probably have burst out much oftener but for the sedative effect of sedulous employment.  But how few princes have ever felt the anomalous impulse for real work; how uncommon is that impulse anywhere; how little are the circumstances of princes calculated to foster it; how little can it be relied on as an ordinary breakwater to their habitual temptations!  Grave and careful men may have domestic virtues on a constitutional throne, but even these fail sometimes, and to imagine that men of more eager temperaments will commonly produce them, is to expect grapes from thorns and figs from thistles.

Lastly, constitutional royalty has the function which I insisted on at length in my last essay, and which, though it is by far the greatest, I need not now enlarge upon again.  It acts as a disguise.  It enables our real rulers to change without heedless people knowing it.  The masses of Englishmen are not fit for an elective government; if they knew how near they were to it, they would be surprised, and almost tremble.

Of a like nature is the value of constitutional royalty in times of transition.  The greatest of all helps to the substitution of a Cabinet government for a preceding absolute monarchy is the accession of a king favourable to such a government, and pledged to it.  Cabinet government, when new, is weak in time of trouble.  The Prime Minister—­the chief on whom everything depends, who must take responsibility if any one is to take it, who must use force if any one is to use it—­is not fixed in power.  He holds his place, by the essence of the Government, with some uncertainty.  Among a people well-accustomed to such a Government, such a functionary may be bold:  he may rely, if not on the Parliament, on the nation which understands and values him.  But when that Government has only recently been introduced, it is difficult for such a Minister to be as bold as he ought to be.  His power rests too much on human reason, and too little on human instinct.  The traditional strength of the hereditary monarch is at these times of incalculable use.  It would have been impossible for England to get through the first years after 1688 but for the singular ability of William III.  It would have been impossible for Italy to have attained and kept her freedom without