"George II" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... armorial bearings. Above each stall is a sword and a banner of faded colors. The tomb of the founder, Henry VII, and of his wife, Elizabeth of York, is in the center of the chapel, and surrounded by a brass screen. George II and several members of his family, Edward VI, Charles II, William and Mary, Queen Anne and her consort, and Cromwell, are all buried near by—most of them having no monuments. In the north aisle of this ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... have paid as much as 30,000 pounds for duty in six weeks. My grandfather told me that in 1732 (time of William and Mary), when he was a boy, the duty on salt was levied for a term of years at first, but made perpetual in the third year of George II. Sir R. Walpole proposed to set apart the proceeds of the ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards. He was one of those quiet men whose sterling value is appreciated only by the few till some crisis makes it stand forth before the world at large. Pitt, Wolfe, and George II all recognized his solid virtues. At thirty he was still some way down the list of lieutenants in the Grenadiers, while Wolfe, two years his junior in age, had been four years in command of a battalion ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... the reign of George II., became bishop, first of St. Asaph, and then of Worcester, and who is well known by his work in defence of the Doctrine and Discipline of the Church of England, lost both his parents, who belonged to a very humble rank of life, at an early age, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... 1810, and again sold in 1827; he died in 1835, aged thirty-three. Sir Walter Gilbey states that "though the Norfolk Hackney achieved its fame through Blaze (foaled 1733), who begat the original Shales, foaled in 1755, and the foundations of this invaluable breed were thus laid in George II.'s time, we must have regard to the period during which the breed achieved its celebrity both at home and abroad, and that period is the long reign of George III." Dr. Knapp expresses himself as much terrified by the invasion of the free path by "a party rushing madly ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... Selwyn, and how that amiable favourite of society went to Paris in order to see the cruel tortures inflicted upon Damiens, and was introduced to the chief performer on the scaffold as a distinguished amateur in executions. One of the best of all these vignettes portrays the funeral of George II., and is a worthy pendant to Lord Hervey's classic account of the Queen's death. It opens with the solemn procession to the torch-lighted Abbey, whose 'long-drawn aisles and fretted vault' excite the imagination of the author of the 'Castle of Otranto.' Then ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... The reign of George II. was a very warlike one. Indeed he was the last king of England who ever was personally in a battle; and, curiously enough, this battle—that of Fontenoy—was the last that a king of France also was present in. It was, however, not a very interesting battle; and it was not clear who really won ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... London in August, 1726, went as guest to the house of a rich merchant at Wandsworth, and remained three years in this country, from the age of thirty-two to the age of thirty-five. He was here when George I. died, and George II. became king. He published here his Henriade. He wrote here his "History of Charles XII." He read "Gulliver's Travels" as a new book, and might have been present at the first night of The Beggar's Opera. He was here ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... knick-knacks as were stored up in it. He appeared to possess more treasures than he himself knew off, or knew where to find; but, rummaging here and there, he brought forth things new and old: rose-nobles, Victoria crowns, gold angels, double sovereigns of George IV., two-guinea pieces of George II.; a marriage-medal of the first Napoleon, only forty-five of which were ever struck off, and of which even the British Museum does not contain a specimen like this, in gold; a brass medal, three or ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bishopric to a clergyman for 5600 pounds. (She betted him the 5000 pounds that he would not be made a bishop, and he lost, and paid her.) Was he the only prelate of his time led up by such hands for consecration? As I peep into George II's St. James, I see crowds of cassocks pushing up the back-stairs of the ladies of the court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into their laps; that godless old king yawning under his canopy in his Chapel ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... greatly astonish an Englishman nowadays, was then a very usual proceeding of the police. Recourse was had to it, notwithstanding the Habeas Corpus Act, up to George II.'s time, especially in such delicate cases as were provided for by lettres de cachet in France; and one of the accusations against which Walpole had to defend himself was that he had caused or allowed Neuhoff to be arrested in that manner. The accusation ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... recorded of them that they sacrificed much in the cause; and when William III. became king they submitted with a good grace to the new order of things. A certain Sir Thomas Marrable was member for his county in the reigns of George I. and George II., and enjoyed a lucrative confidence with Walpole. Then there came a blustering, roystering Sir Thomas, who, together with a fine man and gambler as a heir, brought the property to rather a low ebb; so that when Sir Gregory, the grandfather of our Miss Marrable, came to the title in ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... recorded the baptisms of two of the children of George II., and five of the children of Frederick, Prince of Wales, born at Leicester House, in ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... has been variously attributed to George II, the King then reigning; to the two Georges from whom the land was taken, and to George Washington, which last is, of course, absurd, as he was then a young man of twenty, engaged in surveying ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... interlocutors Swedenborgize. Be they who they may, to this complexion must they come at last. This Charon ferries them all over in his boat; kings, counselors, cavaliers, doctors, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane, King George II., Mahomet, or whosoever, and all gather one grimness of hue and style. Only when Cicero comes by, our gentle seer sticks a little at saying he talked with Cicero, and, with a touch of human relenting, remarks, "one whom it was given me to believe was Cicero;" and when the ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... spent it on horseback. But for everyday the hackney coach was used. Smaller carts were also coming into use. And for dragging about barrels of beer and heavy cases a dray of iron, without wheels, was used. All these innovations meant more noise and still more noise. Had Whittington, in the time of George II., sat down on Highgate Hill (still a grassy slope), he would have heard, loud above the sound of Bow Bells, the rumbling of the ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... travesty of a noble passion was a higher motive than the Greeks really obeyed in the war with Troy. England, it has been sometimes said, went to war with Spain, during George II.'s reign, on account of Capt. Jenkins's ears, which a brutal Spanish officer, in the cowardly abuse of his power, had nailed to the mast. And if she did, the cause was a noble one, however unsuitably ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the Indians over, and with the transfer of Carolina from the hands of the neglectful Lords Proprietors into the possession of King George II, brighter and more prosperous days began to dawn for North Carolina. The population rapidly increased; and, whereas, in 1717 there were only 2,000 persons in the colony, by 1735 this number had increased to 4,000. Lively wranglings there were often between the Royal Governors ...
— In Ancient Albemarle • Catherine Albertson
... sacerdotal functions. His work was methodical and thorough. In order to teach the roving Eskimos the virtues of a settled life, he actually took a number of them on a Continental tour, brought them to London, presented them, at Leicester House, to King George II., the Prince of Wales, and the rest of the Royal Family, and thus imbued them with a love of civilisation. At New Herrnhut, in Greenland, he founded a settlement, as thoroughly organised as Herrnhut in Saxony. He built a church, adorned with pictures depicting the ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... but several copies, simply on death, with a dash here and there of my own put in to suit the present occasion, sufficiently answered the purpose, at the cost of but very little literary labour. One boy, I remember, actually had two old copies on the death of George II., of such respectable antiquity was his ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... Anne, Swift received a deanery, Addison was Secretary of State, Steele a prominent member of Parliament, and Newton, Locke, Prior, Gay, Rowe, Congreve, Tickell, Parnell, and Pope all received direct or indirect aid from the government, in the reigns of George I and George II, Steele died in poverty, Savage walked the streets for want of a lodging, Johnson lived in penury and drudgery. Thomson was deprived of a small office which formed his sole dependence.[92] This neglect of authors and of literature ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... old called Corsica Hall, having been built (originally at Wellingham, near Lewes, and then moved) by a smuggler named Whitfield, who was outlawed for illicit traffic in Corsican wine. He obtained the removal of his outlawry by presenting George II. with a selection of his choicest vintages. Another agreeable story of local corruption is told concerning Seaford's old electioneering days. It was in 1798, during the candidature of Sir Godfrey Webster of Battle Abbey. Sir Godfrey was one day addressed by Mrs. S—— (nothing but ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Guildhall. It is a very ancient edifice of Richard II.'s time, and has a statue over the entrance which looks time-gnawed enough to be of coeval antiquity, although in reality it is only a representation of George II. in his royal robes. We went in, and found ourselves in a large and lofty hall, with an oaken roof and a stone pavement, and the farther end was partitioned off as a court of justice. In that portion of the hall the Judge was on the bench, and a trial was going forward; but in the hither ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... intrigue between Nicky Nacky and the fumbling old senator. The scenes were thought to reek too openly of the stews, and when indeed they were played for the last time in their entirety at the express command of George II, then Prince of Wales, with Pinketham as Antonio and pretty Mrs. Horton Aquilina, the house, in spite of the high patronage, thought fit to demonstrate their pudicity in a very audible manner.[1] The critics too, in a somewhat ductile herd, have modestly decried these ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... have happened many years ago, and the peasantry in the neighbourhood affirm that at midnight a wild huntsman, with his hounds, accompanied by a lady carrying a poisoned cup, is occasionally seen. The story is that, in the reign of George II., a squire, returning unexpectedly home from the chase, discovered his wife with an officer, one of his guests, in too familiar a friendship. High words followed, and the indignant husband, provoked by the cool manner in which the officer treated the matter, struck him, whereupon the guilty ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... and Negro slaves real property, passed in October, 1705, under the reign of Queen Anne, and by her approved, was "explained" and "amended" in February, 1727, during the reign of King George II. Whether the act received its being out of a desire to prevent fraud, like the "Statutes of Frauds," is beyond finding out. But it was an act that showed that slavery had grown to be so common an institution as not to excite human sympathy. And the attempt to "explain" and "amend" its cruel ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... gain his master's favor by voluntarily bearing tales of his companions, up to the bishop who declared that he regarded it not merely as a constitutional principle, but as an ethical fact, that the king could do no wrong, and the other bishop who declared that the reason why George II. died was that this world was not good enough for him, and it was necessary to transfer him to heaven that he might be the right man in the right place. Such persons may succeed in making themselves agreeable to the man with whom they desire to ingratiate themselves, provided that man be a fool or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... sport, and of which I caused a splendid picture to be made and hung over my dining-hall mantelpiece at Castle Lyndon. A year afterwards he had the honour of riding that very horse Endymion before his late Majesty King George II. at New-market, and won the plate there and the attention of the ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Melcombe a year before his death: sufficiently known by his diary from March, 1748, to Feb., 1761. See its character in the Preface to the original edition by his relation, Henry Penruddocke Wyndham, 1784. Other notices will be found in "Edgeworth on Education," Belsham's "George II.," and ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... were preliminary matters. When he came to the eighteenth century Froude had to consider details, and here his prejudice against Catholicism led him astray. In the reign of George II. acts of lawless violence were not uncommon on this side of the Channel, and Richardson's Clarissa was read with a credulity which showed that abduction could be committed without being followed by punishment. In parts of Ireland it was not an infrequent offence, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... collections in England are, undoubtedly, those at the British Museum and at the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The collection at the British Museum is especially rich, the earlier and finer specimens almost invariably having formed part of the old Royal Library of England given by George II. to ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... understand this or other books of the same nature until you penetrate into their extreme difficulty,—until, in short, you find out that you can not thoroughly understand them yet. Queen Caroline, George II.'s wife, in the hope of proving to Bishop Horsley how fully she appreciated the value of the work I have just mentioned, told him that she had it constantly beside her at her breakfast-table, to read a page or two in it whenever she had an idle moment. The Bishop's ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... parliamentary remedy, have been the subject of not fewer than, I think, forty-three Acts of Parliament, in which they have been changed with all the authority of a creator over its creature, from Magna Charta to the great alterations which were made in the 29th of George II. ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... by no means rare from an early period in the annals of England, but according to Blackstone this was no part of the legal judgment. It was not until 1752, by an Act of 25 George II., that gibbeting was legally recognised. After execution by this statute, bodies were to be given to the surgeons to be dissected and anatomized, and not to be buried without this being done. The judge might direct the body ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... Scott states, in his Introduction to Redgauntlet, that the government of George II were in possession of sufficient evidence that Dr. Cameron had returned to the Highlands, not, as he alleged on his trial, for family affairs merely, but as the secret agent of the Pretender in a new scheme of rebellion: ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... truth (or to the generally reputed truth) of a story which I had heard from other authority, viz., that the librarian, or, if not officially the librarian, at least the chief director in every thing relating to the books, was an illegitimate son of Frederic, Prince of Wales, (son to George II.,) and therefore half-brother of the king. His own taste and inclinations, it seemed, concurred with his brother's wishes in keeping him in a subordinate rank and an obscure station; in which, however, he enjoyed affluence without anxiety, or trouble, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... had been simple and true to Nature, while that of his descendant was a system of elaborate, though unconscious affectations. Cato behaved as absurdly as an American would behave who should attempt to imitate his great-grandfather, the old gentleman having died a loyal subject of George II. He was an honest man, according to the Roman standard of honesty, which allowed a great margin for the worst villany, provided it were done for the public good, or what was supposed to be the public good. Like some politicians of our time, he thought, that, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... of George I and George II, a succession of great Whigs (of whom one, Sir Robert Walpole, held office for twenty-one years) formed the Cabinet Council of the King. Their leader was finally recognised as the official leader not only of the ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... birch bark map, which showed all the streams and water courses from Lake Superior to Lake of the Woods, and on to Lake Winnipeg. This was when the "well-beloved" Louis XV. was King of France, and George II. King of England. It was heroic of Verandrye to face the danger, but he was a soldier who had been twice wounded in battle in Europe, and had the French love of glory. By carrying his canoes over the portages, and running the rapids when possible, he came ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... this Odell who had first opened a theatre in Goodman's Fields, which, upon the complaint of the civic authorities, who believed the drama to be a source of danger to the London apprentices of the period, he had been compelled forthwith to close. He applied to George II, for a royal license, but met with a peremptory refusal. In 1731 he sold his property to one Giffard, who rebuilt the theatre, and, dispensing with official permission, performed stage plays between the intervals of a concert, until producing Garrick, and obtaining extraordinary ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne, heir of the dukedom of Argyll, had just preceded the illness of the Prince and was regarded with much more attention because no British subject since the days of George II's legislation as to royal alliances had been deemed worthy of such honour. But not even the more outwardly splendid match between the Queen's sailor son, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, and the daughter of the Czar Alexander, could eclipse in popularity the quiet marriage, ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... people, forming to-day more than half of her army and navy, whose efforts have helped to cover her flag with honor, and whose memorable absence from the English ranks at Fontenoy wrung that bitter expression from the heart of George II. when the victorious tide of the English battle was rolled back by the Irish brigade, "Cursed be the laws which deprive ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... WHEN George II. was once expressing his admiration of General Wolfe, some one observed that the General was mad. "Oh! he is mad, is he!" said the king, with great quickness, "then I wish he would bite some other ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... Edinburgh ministers, in the name of 'Charles, Prince Regent,' desiring them to open their churches next day as usual. McVicar preached to a large congregation, many of whom were armed Highlanders, and prayed for George II., and also for Charles Edward, in the following fashion: 'Bless the king! Thou knowest what king I mean. May the crown sit long upon his head! As for that young man who has come among us to seek an earthly crown, we beseech ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin |
