George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

[99] sobriety and also his constitutional fondness for domes-

chap. IV.} 1752.

tic life were alike observable. He never loved study; but when he excused his want of application as idleness, ‘Yours,’ retorted Scott, ‘is not idleness; you must not call being asleep all day being idle.’¹ ‘I really do not well know,’ said his mother,² ‘what his receptors teach him; but, to speak freely, I am afraid not much;’ and she thought logic, in which the bishop, his tutor, instructed him, ‘a very odd study for a child of his condition.’ ‘I do not much regard books,’ rejoined her adviser, Dodington; ‘but his Royal Highness should be informed of the general frame of this government and constitution, and the general course of business.’ ‘I am of your opinion,’ answered the princess; ‘and Stone tells me, upon those subjects the prince seems to give a proper attention, and make pertinent remarks.’ ‘I know nothing,’ she added, ‘of the Jacobitism attempted to be instilled into the child; I cannot conceive what they mean;’ for to a German princess the supremacy of regal authority seemed a tenet very proper to be inculcated. But Lord Harcourt, the governor, ‘complained strongly to the king, that dangerous notions and arbitrary principles were instilled into the prince; that he could be of no use, unless the instillers of that doctrine, Stone, Cresset, and Scott, were dismissed;’ and the Earl of Waldegrave, Harcourt's successor, ‘found Prince George uncommonly full of princely prejudices, contracted in the nursery, and improved by the society of bed-chamber women, and pages of the back stairs. A right system of education seemed impracticable.’³