[12]. Lord Harcourt resigned his office of Governor to the Prince at the beginning of December, 1752. Scott, then the Prince’s tutor, was recommended to his office by Bolingbroke. The Bishop of Peterborough’s appointment as Preceptor was made in January, 1753. Among the books complained of, the Histoire de la Grande Bretagne of Father Orléans, and the Introduction à la vie du Roi Henri IV of another Jesuit, Father Péréfixe, are said to have been included. Another and more famous book, which was much in Prince George’s hands in his early years, was also obnoxious to the Whigs—Bolingbroke’s Idea of a Patriot King. But it would scarcely have been prudent in the malcontents to have put a work which (whatever its faults) ranks, to some extent, among our English classics, in the same expurgatory, or prohibitory, index with the books of Orléans and of Péréfixe. If George the Third got some harm out of Lord Bolingbroke’s book, he probably obtained also some good. Pure Whiggism—pure but not simple—has never been noted for any discriminating tolerance of spirit. And, in 1752, it was furious at the prospect that the continuance of its long domination was imperilled.
[13]. The mansion for which the Trustees of the British Museum had been asked to give £30,000 was sold, five years afterwards, to the King for £20,000. It was purchased for the Queen as a jointure-house in lieu of her proper mansion, Somerset House, then devoted to public purposes. All the royal princes and princesses were born in Buckingham House, except George IV, and one, perhaps, of the younger children.
[14]. The story, I observe, has been endorsed in Mr. Blades’ excellent Life of Caxton (see part 2, p. 268), but it is undoubtedly a distortion or exaggeration of some chance occurrence. No such series could have been formed otherwise than, in the main, by systematic research.
[15]. Edinburgh Weekly Journal, Feb. 1820. The article is reprinted in Miscellaneous Prose Works, Edition of 1841, vol. ii, p. 184.
[16]. ‘Ralph Robinson’ is the name signed to the communications to the Annals of Agriculture, but they are dated from Windsor. (See Annals, vol. vii, 1787.)
[17]. Curiously enough, three volumes of the Georgian MSS. had belonged to Sir Hans Sloane, and had, in some unexplained way, come to be separated from the bulk of his Collection. They now rejoined their old companions in Great Russell Street.
[18]. See, before, p. 339.
[19]. John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich (1729–1792).
[20]. Solander, who was afterwards to be so intimately connected with the Banksian Collections, had been for some years in this country when he was selected by Banks to be one of his companions in the voyage of The Endeavour. He was born in Sweden, in the year 1736. He came to England in July, 1760. He succeeded Dr. Maty, as Under-Librarian of the British Museum, in 1773, when Maty was made Principal-Librarian. At that date he had already served the Trustees for many years as one of their Assistant-Librarians.
[21]. See Book I, c. 6.