George III by Bernard Capes — Read

His Majesty King George III stood gazing from a corridor window of the royal palace. For all practical purposes he was alone, and the equerries and others attendant on the sovereign presence flitted almost as remote in actuality as they figured to his mental vision. They were shadows, no more -- little blots of bile, too minute to intercept his view of things, though collectively, as denoting a bodily condition, a source of irritation.

The corridor was very dim, and full of gusty flaws. It was night, and the rain beat upon the windows. Without, it was all a chaos of cavernous glooms and myriad-drawn threads of water, weaving cloud to earth in one inextricable bondage. The darkness lay upon the King's heart like a tombstone. He cried to One in his agony to lift it, and bid the dead arise and come forth. He seemed to feel the cerements about his limbs, the headcloth binding and stupefying his brain. He talked incessantly to himself -- prayers, expostulations, even blasphemies -- though he did not know it. A fearful thought was haunting him persistently -- the thought that his reason was once more succumbing to the illness which had seized and overwhelmed it in the fifth year of his reign. He gasped and shivered in the stress of that apprehension.