sternly reprimanded by his father, replied that he had "been ordered by his doctor to wear a wig, for he was subject to cold." Whereupon the King, whether to vent the aversion he already felt for his son or in complacence at the satisfactory result of his discipline, turned to Lord Essex and remarked, "A lie is ever ready when it is wanted." George never lost this early-engrained habit of lies. It is to George's childish fear of his guardians that we must trace that extraordinary power of bamboozling his courtiers, his ministry and his mistresses that distinguished him through his long life. It is characteristic of the man that he should himself have bitterly deplored his own untruthfulness. When, in after years, he was consulting Lady Spencer upon the choice of a governess for his child he made this remarkable speech, "Above all, she must be taught the truth. You know that I don't speak the truth and my brothers don't, and I find it a great defect, from which I would have my daughter free. We have been brought up badly, the Queen having taught us to equivocate." You may laugh at the picture of the little chubby, curly-heeded fellows learning to equivocate at their mother's knee, but you must remember that the wisest master of ethics himself, in his theory of ἕξεις ἀποδείκτικαι, similarly raised virtues, such as telling the truth, to the level of regular accomplishments, and before you judge poor George harshly, in his entanglements of lying, remember the cruelly unwise education he had undergone.
However much we may deplore this exaggerated tyranny, by reason of its evil effect upon his moral nature, we cannot but feel glad that it existed, to afford a piquant contrast to the life awaiting him. Had he passed through the callow dissipations of Eton and Oxford, like other young men of his age, he would assuredly have lacked much of that splendid pent vigour with which he rushed headlong into London life. He was so young and so handsome,and
