Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PAUCITY OF ANECDOTES political life, of his character, and fortune; made the best atonement to his country, and to posterity, for the irregularities and agitations which marked the zenith of his career, by tracing with his own hand, in his decline, the outline of those transactions which he had guided or produced. We forget his deviations from prudence, his faction, and his ambition, in the elegance of his genius, and the ingenuous disclosure of his errors. Perhaps no portion of time in the course of the two last centuries, offers, proportionably to its duration, so few of those interesting anecdotes at which we eagerly grasp, where the Sovereign comes personally forward to our inspection, as the reign of George the Third. The reason is obvious, and arose out of the King's character. Charles the Second, and Louis the Fourteenth, surrounded by mistresses, and all the dissipation of a Court, presented to Burnet, to Grammont, or to Voltaire, perpetual matter of entertaining recital. Even George the First and Second offered some resources of a similar nature, to Lord Melcomb, for his " Diary;" and to Horace Walpole, for his " Reminiscences." But, His present Majesty's whole life, from the age of twenty-two, down to the lamented period at which he ceased to reign, was passed either in the severe and exemplary discharge of his miblic duties of every description; or in the bosom of his family, amidst domestic sources of amusement. In his agricultural occupations, or when engaged in the diversions of the field, he was only seen by the few, who from their official situations or dignity, had access to his person. No splendid assemblies of both sexes, or festive entertainments, to which beauty, rank, and pleasure in a comprehensive sense, must have contributed; by levelling him in s...
评价“Historical Memoirs of My Own Time”