Page:Memoirs of a Trait in the Character of George III.djvu/287

232 at the brutality of the Jacobin who could deliberately produce a ditty, which it may be thought, all hell alone could have responded. It originated in a report which crossed the channel, that the regicides had placed the miserable Prince, Lewis XVII. with a shoemaker: which one unworthy Englishman, either for lucre, or from a besotted depravity, thus commented on.

See stool-propp'd Majesty the leather spread, Behold its pretty fingers wax the thread, And now the leather on the lapstone; hole, Now puts his Majesty the bristle in, Now wide he throws his arms, with milk-white skin, And now he spits, and hammers on the sole.

Such was, in effect, the prime supporter of the haughty unknown, who wreaks his vengeance on George 3rd, in the spirit of a New Zealand savage, for injuries which must remain for ever undefined, and had they been contemporaries, he would in equity have been entitled to the distinguished consideration, and to a cover at the table of the malevolent spirit, his half brother: where they might have debated the point like two Chieftains from Pandemonium,"To find no end, all in infernal mazes lost."— One of the most prominent assertions they are both conspicuous for, is that George 3rd was insatiably fond of flattery; and if it be allowed to furnish a criterion for our confidence in their veracity, is it not below contempt? We need not repeat that the case of John Harrison affords as decisive a contradiction to this calumny, as De Foe or Richardson could have invented—it would have been blazoned eftsoons in every corner of the palace, and echoed in the adjoining precincts, had this Prince been disposed to snuff such incense; and had he not, on the contrary "shut his ears to the voice of the charmer, charmed he never so wisely."

We are not sure we are correct in giving this low-lived fellow, as Junius would have called his kinsman, the credit of making a defamatory stride beyond his principal in