FARMER GEORGE.
Fanner George. By Lewis Melville. With 53 Portraits and Illustrations. 2 vols. (Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons. 24s. net.)— Mr. Melville accepts all that has been written to the discredit of King George and his Consort, and he revives much malicious gossip that had better have been left in oblivion. The curious will find a good deal of entertainment in these pages, for Mr. Melville is an industrious compiler and knows his authorities and his period, and the literature of the day is rich in caricature and lampoon. The spirit in which he approaches what is one of the most momentous reigns in our annals may be gathered from the following extract :—" Farmer George,' the nickname that has clung to him ever since it was bestowed satirically in the early days of his reign, has come, except by those well versed in the history of the times, to be accepted as a tribute to his simple- raindness and his homely mode of living. To those it will come as a shock to learn that 'Farmer George' was a politician of duplicity so amazing that, were he other than a sovereign, it might well be written down as unscrupulousness. Loyalty indeed seems to have been foreign to his nature." This is an echo of old, unhappy, far-off days, and of the stamped pages into which Mr. J. R. Green compressed the later epochs of his "Short History." We have outgrown those slapdash sentences, and we ask for a saner judgment, and one less biassed by popular tradition, in a book that aims at giving a faithful picture of George III.
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