Page:Memoirs of a Trait in the Character of George III.djvu/92

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been offered to the Count of Angoulesme.[1] In like manner, if the King of England chose to merge the regal character in that of the astronomer, or mathematician, for the time being, he would, consonant to this idea, acquiesce in placing himself on a level, as such, with these his good (or his bad) subjects.[2]Here, however, it is evident that to the

  1. This sentiment is occasionally met with both in history and works of fiction. Lewis 11th though his memory is odious, affected it. The Emperor Adrian meeting one by whom he had been injured before his accession to the purple, said to him, with a significant look, you are safe now: and the Author of Klimius, or the World under Ground; (the Danish Gulliver) makes his hero, who had risen from a very low station, say, it did not become the Emperor of Quama to revenge the Wrongs he had suffered when a chairman.
  2. If the Telescope being, at seasons of leisure, in that hand destined to hold the sceptre, exposed him to the contumely of brother astronomers, who were too much engrossed by their own accomplishments to be attracted by any merit, in a superior quarter indeed, but not set off by those capitals A.M. or LL. D., how can their successors make out a case which the famed scientific Monarch, who to this day supports the spheres on his shoulders, could have heard without shaking his curls, like Jupiter, and giving a nod tremendously significant of his dissent from self-sufficient hallucinations, which would thereafter expose them to a petrifying cross examination from Minos, Eacus, or Rhadamanthus? The unworthy treatment which the beneficent head of the state subsequently experienced from these his graceless subjects, who had authorized the publication of a trial categorically analyzed herewith: and to which the Astronomer Royal, with all the mathematical talents of Oxford and Cambridge to assist him in confuting the experience of Dr, Halley, Dr. Bevis,