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Works: The four Georges, and the English humourists
Works The four Georges and the English humourists Author:William Makepeace Thackeray 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: GEORGE THE THIRD. E have to glance over sixty years in as many minutes. To read the mere catalogue of characters who figured during that long period, would oc... more »cupy our allotted time, and we should have all text and no sermon. England has to undergo the revolt of the American colonies ; to submit to defeat and separation ; to shake under the volcano of the French Revolution ; to grapple and fight for the life with her gigantic enemy Napoleon ; to gasp and rally after that tremendous struggle. The old society, with its courtly splendours, has to pass away ; generations of statesmen to rise and disappear ; Pitt to follow Chatham to the tomb ; the memory of Rodney and Wolfe to be superseded by Nelson's and Wellington's glory ; the old poets who unite us to Queen Anne's time to sink into their graves ; Johnson to die, and Scott and Byron to arise ; Garrick to delight the world with his dazzling dramatic genius, and Kean to leap on the stage and take possession of the astonished theatre. Steam has to be invented ; kings to be beheaded, banished, deposed, restored. Napoleon is to be but an episode, and George III. is to be alive through all these varied changes, to accompany his people through all these revolutions of thought, government, society ; to survive out cf the old world into ours. When I first saw England, she was in mourning for the young Princess Charlotte, the hope of the empire. I came from India as a child, and our ship touched at an island on the way home, where my black servant took me a long walk over rocks and hills until we reached a garden, where we saw a man walking. " That is he," said the black man : " that is Bonaparte ! He eats three sheep every day, and all the little children he can lay hands on ! " There were people in the British dominions besides that ...« less