n women and fat, and
earthly contradictions and confusions,--fairly off him; and lies there.

The man had his big burdens, big honors so called, absurd enough some
of them, in this world; but he bore them with a certain gravity and
discretion: a man of more probity, insight and general human faculty
than he now gets credit for. His word was sacred to him. He had the
courage of a Welf, or Lion-Man; quietly royal in that respect at least.
His sense of equity, of what was true and honorable in men and things,
remained uneffaced to a respectable degree; and surely it had resisted
much. Wilder puddle of muddy infatuations from without and from within,
if we consider it well,--of irreconcilable incoherences, bottomless
universal hypocrisies, solecisms bred with him and imposed on him,--few
sons of Adam had hitherto lived in.

He was, in one word, the first of our Hanover Series of English Kings;
that hitherto unique sort, who are really strange to look at in the
History of the World. Of whom, in the English annals, there is hitherto
no Picture to be had; nothing but an empty blur of discordant nonsenses,
and idle, generally angry, flourishings of the pen, by way of Picture.
The English Nation, having flung its old Puritan, Sword-and-Bible Faith
into the cesspool,--or rather having set its old Bible-Faith, MINUS
any Sword, well up in the organ-loft, with plenty of revenue, there to
preach and organ at discretion, on condition always of meddling with
nobody's practice farther,--thought the same (such their mistake) a
mighty pretty arrangement; but found it hitch before long. They had to
throw out their beautiful Nell-Gwynn Defenders of the Faith; fling
them also into the cesspool; and were rather at a loss what next to do.
"Where is our real King, then? Who IS to lead us Heavenward, then; to
rally the noble of us to him, in some small measure, and save the rest
and their affairs from running Devilward?"--The English Nation being in
some difficulty as to Kings, the English Nation clutched up the readiest
that came to hand; "Here is our King!" said they,--again under mistake,
still under their old mistake. And, what was singular, they then avenged
themselves by mocking, calumniating, by angrily speaking, writing and
laughing at the poor mistaken King so clutched!--It is high time the
English were candidly asking themselves, with very great seriousness
indeed, WHAT it was they had done, in the sight of God and man, on that
and th