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

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Such acclamations welcomed the accession of George

chap. XVII.} 1760. Nov.

the Third, whom youth and victory, conquest and the love of glory, popular acclamation and the voice of Pitt, the prospect of winning all America and all the Indies, could not, as it seemed, swerve from the fixed purpose of moderation in triumph and the earliest practicable peace. But the ruling idea of his mind, early developed and indelibly branded in, was the restoration of the prerogative, which in America the provincial assemblies had resisted and defied; which in England had one obstacle in the rising importance of the people, as represented by Pitt, and another in the established power of the oligarchy under the banner of Newcastle.¹ The man at maturity is but the continuation of the youth; from the day of his accession, George the Third displayed an innate love of authority, and, with a reluctant yielding to present obstacles, the reserved purpose of asserting his self-will, which doomed him in a universe of change to oppose reform, and struggle continuously, though hopelessly, against the slow but resistless approaches of popular power.

‘Our young man,’² wrote Holdernesse, one of the secretaries of state, ‘shows great attention to his affairs, and an earnest desire of being truly informed of the state of them. He is patient and diligent in business, and gives evident marks of perspicuity and good sense.’ ‘Nothing can be more amiable, more virtuous, or better disposed, than our present monarch,’ reported Barrington,³ the secretary at war, but a few weeks later; ‘he applies himself thoroughly to ’