ails as to his walks and drives is, in reality, the more
likely to create a vivid impression of his personality, and therefore to
produce this particular kind of emotion, the more ordinary the events
described are in themselves. But since an emotion arising out of
ordinary events is difficult to explain on a purely intellectual basis,
these events are written about as revealing a life of extraordinary
regularity and industry. When the affection is formed it is even
sometimes described as an inevitable reasoned conclusion arising from
reflection upon a reign during which there have been an unusual number
of good harvests or great inventions.

Sometimes the impulse of affection is excited to a point at which its
non-rational character becomes obvious. George the Third was beloved by
the English people because they realised intensely that, like
themselves, he had been born in England, and because the published facts
of his daily life came home to them. Fanny Burney describes, therefore,
how when, during an attack of madness, he was to be taken in a coach to
Kew, the doctors who were to accompany him were seriously afraid that
the inhabitants of any village who saw that the King was under restraint
would attack them.[8] The kindred emotion of personal and dynastic
loyalty (whose origin is possibly to be found in the fact that the
loosely organised companies of our prehuman ancestors could not defend
themselves from their carnivorous enemies until the general instinct of
affection was specialised into a vehement impulse to follow and protect
their leader), has again and again produced destructive and utterly
useless civil wars.

[8] _Diary of Madame D'Arblay_, ed. 1905, vol. iv. p. 184, 'If they even
attempted force, they had not a doubt but his smallest resistance would
call up the whole country to his fancied rescue.'

Fear often accompanies and, in politics, is confused with affection. A
man, whose life's dream it has been to get sight and speech of his King,
is accidentally brought face to face with him. He is 'rooted to the
spot,' becomes pale, and is unable to speak, because a movement might
have betrayed his ancestors to a lion or a bear, or earlier still, to a
hungry cuttlefish. It would be an interesting experiment if some
professor of experimental psychology would arrange his class in the
laboratory with sphygmographs on their wrists ready to record those
pulse movements which accompany the sensation of 'thrill,'