be persuaded to serve
himself, and chose rather to endanger the lives of his best and most
faithful friends, than part with an harlot, whom, as he often declared,
he neither loved nor esteemed.'

From this anecdote, the general truth of which is indubitable, the
principal fault of Charles Edward's temper is sufficiently obvious. It
was a high sense of his own importance, and an obstinate adherence to
what he had once determined on--qualities which, if he had succeeded in
his bold attempt, gave the nation little room to hope that he would have
been found free from the love of prerogative and desire of arbitrary
power, which characterized his unhappy grandfather. He gave a notable
instance how far this was the leading feature of his character, when,
for no reasonable cause that can be assigned, he placed his own single
will in opposition to the necessities of France, which, in order to
purchase a peace become necessary to the kingdom, was reduced to gratify
Britain by prohibiting the residence of Charles within any part of the
French dominions. It was in vain that France endeavoured to lessen the
disgrace of this step by making the most flattering offers, in hopes
to induce the prince of himself to anticipate this disagreeable
alternative, which, if seriously enforced, as it was likely to be, he
had no means whatever of resisting, by leaving the kingdom as of his
own free will. Inspired, however, by the spirit of hereditary obstinacy,
Charles preferred a useless resistance to a dignified submission, and,
by a series of idle bravadoes, laid the French court under the necessity
of arresting their late ally, and sending him to close confinement
in the Bastille, from which he was afterwards sent out of the French
dominions, much in the manner in which a convict is transported to the
place of his destination.

In addition to these repeated instances of a rash and inflexible temper,
Dr. King also adds faults alleged to belong to the prince's character,
of a kind less consonant with his noble birth and high pretensions.
He is said by this author to have been avaricious, or parsimonious at
least, to such a degree of meanness, as to fail, even when he had
ample means, in relieving the sufferers who had lost their fortune, and
sacrificed all in his ill-fated attempt. [The approach is thus expressed
by Dr. King, who brings the charge:--'But the most odious part of his
character is his love of money, a vice which I do not remember t