[193] This was enough.

The King eagerly caught at the hint.
He began to flatter himself that he might at once escape from the disagreeable necessity of removing a friend, and secure an able coadjutor for the great work which was in progress.

He was also elated by the hope that he might have the merit and the glory of saving a fellow creature from perdition.

He seems, indeed, about this time, to have been seized with an unusually violent fit of zeal for his religion; and this is the more remarkable, because he had just relapsed, after a short interval of selfrestraint, into debauchery which all Christian divines condemn as sinful, and which, in an elderly man married to an agreeable young wife, is regarded even by people of the world as disreputable.

Lady Dorchester had returned from Dublin, and was again the King's mistress.