retained the name of Guelph, and the other acquired chat of Ghibeline, and each of them was powerful enough to maintain an army in the field. The bloody contest was waged a while among the German mountains. The family quarrel, as was usually the case in those days, absorbed into itself public questions of great pith and moment, until the whole south of Europe were drawn into the interminable strife. It was this famous contest between the Guelphs and the Ghibelines which saddened the existence of the poet Dante, and made him for twenty years an exile from his native city.

When mortals fight, it rarely happens that one party is wholly in the right, and the other wholly in the wrong. Both the Guelphs and the Ghibelines committed enormous outrages. Neither of them was strong enough to hold the other in subjection, and neither was great enough to forgive a fallen foe. When the Guelphs conquered a province or captured a city, they banished the powerful Ghibelines, and confiscated their estates. The Ghibelines, when they were victors, pursued the same policy. Consequently there were always a great number of persons, both within and without the conquered place, whose only hope of regaining their rights and property was in overturning the government. Hence three centuries of fruitless, desolating war.

But although in this cardinal error of the contest there was not a pin to choose between the hostile factions, it is nevertheless evident that the Guelphs were, upon the whole, fighting the battle of mankind. Dante was upon their side, -a great fact in itself. Closely allied with the pope, then the chief civilizing power of Europe, the sole protector of the people against the tyranny of their lords, the Guelphs were greatly instrumental in limiting the power of the emperors, and preventing all the fairest countries of Europe from lapsing under the dominion of a single dynasty.

It was from these warlike Guelphs of the middle ages that

the present royal house of England descended. Gibbon, indeed, traces the family of Guelph up to Charlemagne ; but we need not follow him so far in the labyrinth of heraldry. Let it suffice us to know that a powerful prince of the Guelphian race, six hundred years ago or more, acquired by marriage extensive possessions in the north of Germany. This prince is known in the history of Germany as Henry the Black. Other Henries succeeded, Henry the Proud, Henry the Lion, and a long line of Henries, Williams, Othos, Georges, and Ernests, until at length we find a branch of the family established in Hanover, and ruling that province with the title of elector.

---

Not much can be said in commendation of the more recent ancestors of Queen Victoria. George the First was fiftyfour years of age when he stepped ashore at Greenwich, and walked to the royal palace in its park, hailed and saluted as King of England. He was an honest, hearty man, brave and resolute; but he had an incurable narrowness of mind, and he was as ignorant of all that a king ought to know as the kings of that period generally were.

"My maxim is," he used to say, never to abandon my friends; to do justice to all the world, and to fear no man." The saying does him honor. He was a man of punctual and business-like habits, diligent in performing the duties appertaining to his place, so far as he understood them. But, unhappily, when he left his native country, he left his heart behind him. He loved Hanover, and a man can no more love two countries than two women. He understood Hanover; he never understood England; and the thing which he had at heart, during his whole reign, was the aggrandizement of Hanover. He had the satisfaction of dying in his native land, which he was accustomed frequently to visit, and his dust still reposes there in the electoral mausoleum.

His son, George the Second, with all his narrowness and

ignorance, was not without his good and strong points. Like most of his ancestors, he was honest, well-intentioned, and braye; and, like most of his ancestors, he was singularly unfitted to have anything to do with the government of a great nation. The ornament of his court was Queen Caroline, a patron of art and literature, whom the king loved truly, and scolded incessantly, whom he sincerely respected and continually dishonored. The scenes which took place at the death-bed of this queen show us something of the character of both of the ill-assorted pair.

"The king," says a recent writer, "was heart-broken, but he was himself. He could not leave her in peace at that last moment. By way of watching over her, he lay on the queen's bed all night in his nightgown, where he could not sleep nor she turn about easily.' He went out and in continually, telling everybody, with tears, of her great qualities. But he could not restrain the old habit of scolding when he was by her side. How the devil should you sleep when you will never lie still a moment!' he cried with an impatience which those who have watched by a death-bed will at least understand. You want to rest, and the doctors tell you nothing can do you so much good, and yet you always move about. Nobody can sleep in that manner, and that is always your way; you never take the proper method to get what you want, and then you wonder you have it not.' When her weary eyes, weary of watching the troubled comings and goings about her, fixed upon one spot, the alarmed, excited, hasty spectator cried out, with a loud and quick voice, Mon Dieu! qu'est ce que vous regardez? Comment peut-on fixer ces yeux comme ca?' he cried. He tortured her to eat, as many a healthful watcher does with cruel kindness. How is it possible you should know whether you like a thing or not?' he said. He was half-crazed with sorrow and love, and a kind of panic. And he was garrulous, and talked without

intermission of her and of himself, with a vague historical sense, as if talking of a life that had come to an end.

"One incident of this death-bed scene is probably without a parallel in the history of the human race: She counselled him to marry again, as he sat sobbing by her bedside. Poor man he was hysterical, too, with grief and excitement. Wiping his eyes and sobbing between every word, with much ado, he got out this answer: Non-j'aurai des maîtresses.' To which the queen made no other reply than, 'Ah, mon Dieu! cela n'empeche pas!' Criticism stands confounded before such an incident."

Such was George the Second, the great-great-grandfather of the present virtuous sovereign of England. Such was the British Court a little more than a hundred years ago.

The eldest son of George the Second, Prince Frederick, or the Prince of Wales, was stupid even for a prince. He passed his brief existence in political intrigues with his father's enemies, and in debauchery with the worst of the young nobility. No good or even graceful action relieves the tedious record of his life. We need only say of him — for little else is known that he embittered his father's days, and that England was well rid of him before it came his turn to play the part of king. George the Third, the grandfather of Queen Victoria, was the son of this Prince Frederick.

George the Third, who plays so important a part in the history of the United States, was one of the most virtuous and most mischievous of kings. He was honest, charitable, and temperate; he was as good a father as an ignorant man can ever hope to be; he was an attentive and affectionate husband; he was a considerate and liberal master and patron. If he had been born to the inheritance of a small farm, if he had been a huntsman in Windsor Park, instead of lord of the castle, he would have lived happily and wisely, and all his native parish would have followed him mourning to the

tomb. But alas for England, tax-paying England! it was his destiny to be styled king, and to indulge all his life the fond delusion that he really was a king.

With such a father as he had, it is not necessary to say that his early education was most grossly and shamefully neglected; and after his father's death, he fell under the influence of men and women who starved his intellect and fed his pride. Coming to the throne in his twenty-second year, ignorant of history, ignorant of the English people, totally unacquainted with the spirit of a constitutional government, equally obstinate and conscientious, the whole policy of his reign was erroneous. He displaced William Pitt, and promoted Bute. It was he, and only he, who exasperated into rebellion the most loyal of his subjects, the people of the American colonies. Instead of hailing with joy the accession of Napoleon to supreme power in distracted France, instead of aiding him to bring order once more out of the chaos of that kingdom, instead of being his hearty friend and ally, as he ought to have been for England's sake, as well as for that of France and mankind, he squandered and mortgaged deep the resources of the wealthiest empire on earth, in waging and inciting war against the only man who had it in him to rescue France and prepare her for a nobler future. He drove Napoleon mad; he prepared for him the long series of victories which wasted his time, wasted his strength, and destroyed the balance between his reason and his passions.

When George the Third came to the throne in 1760, the national debt of England was one hundred and thirty millions of pounds. The American war raised it to two hundred and sixty millions. The insensate warfare against the French Revolution made it five hundred and seventy millions; and by the time Napoleon was safely landed in Saint Helena, the debt amounted to the inconceivable sum of eight hundred