letins discontinued, by his authority over the physicians against their judgment; —such was the selfdelusion with which he clung to life. But his disease was not merely dangerous, it was incurable,an ossification of the heart. Seized with a fit of coughing, he burst a blood-vessel, and expired, leaning on an attendant, at three o'clock in the morning of the 26th of June.

In the events and achievements which give interest and lustre to his regency and reign, George IV. had personally no share. He was but contemporary with them. To the progress of science, of literature, of legislation, he was a stranger. The jealous limitations of the regal power, the independence, enterprise, and social advancement of the nation, would account and afford excuse for this: but were he absolute as Louis XIV., - obeyed and imitated with the same implicit servility, the higher purposes of intellectual being were beyond his range. With the fine arts his relations were more close and personal. The progress of architecture was sudden and astonishing, during the epoch which will bear his name. London, before his accession to the executive power, was a rich, populous, elegantly built capital, but without a due proportion of prominent structures characterised by architectural grandeur, beauty, or curiosity. In a few years magnificent lines and masses of building were begun and completed; but they were mainly the growth of wealth, vanity, speculation, and peace. Where his influence was directly felt it proved unfortunate. He lavished millions in creating vicious models, and fantastic styles of architecture, and brought into

fashion artists without capacity or taste. There was not in his kingdom a more discerning judge of painting; but he had no imagination for the higher class of art. He preferred the exquisite and humorous realities of the Dutch painters to the poetic or historic schools of Italy; and, though a studious collector, he gave no great impulse to native talent. In music he had both taste and skill: he encouraged an art which formed one of his enjoyments; and if his patronage has brought forth no composer of the first order, the cause may exist in some circumstances of national inaptitude.

It is necessary to go back some centuries for an English king to whom he bears the nearest likeness in ensemble of character. The parallel at first sight may be thought injurious, but the likeness will upon consideration be found striking and complete. George IV. had in his youth the éclat of personal endowment, education, and accomplishment, of success in the fashionable exercises and graces of his age, and of that reckless prodigality which obtains popular homage and applause in a prince. Henry VIII. in his youth was one of the most brilliant personages of Europe. A fine person, the accomplishments of his time in literature and the arts, the display of gorgeous prodigality,―raised him to a sort of chivalrous rivalry with Francis I. In mental culture he excelled George IV., who owes much of his reputation for capacity and acquirement to an imposing manner, and the eagerness to applaud a prince: stripped of this charm, his ideas and language appeared worse than common when he put them on paper. Both had the same dominant

ambition to be distinguished and imitated, as the arbiters of fashion in dress for the costliness, splendour, or novelty of their toilet. Henry VIII. and George IV. surrounded themselves with the men most distinguished for wit and talent, with a remarkable coincidence of motive, as ministering to their vanity or pleasures; but as soon as they became troublesome or useless, both cast them off with the same careless indifference. Henry VIII., it is true, sacrificed to his own caprices, or to court intrigue, the lives of those whom he had chosen for his social familiarity; whilst George IV. merely turned off his so called friends, and thought of them no more. But such is the difference between barbarism and tyranny on the one side, and civilisation and freedom on the other: that which was death in the former, is but court disgrace in the latter. George IV. was not cruel-he had even a certain susceptibility; the spectacle of human suffering revolted him but suffering to affect him must have been present to his sense. Was Henry VIII. gratuitously cruel? That does not appear. He took no pleasure for itself in shedding blood, and avoided being a witness of it. Had he been obliged to look on whilst Anne Boleyn and Sir Thomas More were bleeding, he probably would have spared them. He sacrificed them to his impulses from mere selfish indifference. With their wives and mistresses Henry VIII. and George IV. were governed by the same self-indulgent despotism-the same animal disgusts. Henry VIII. had six wives, and sent one to the scaffold as the prelude to his marriage with another. George IV. had only one

wife, but she suffered the persecutions of six; and if she escaped decapitation or divorce, it was from no failure of inclination or instruments. Henry VIII. was the tyrant of his people, and George IV. was not yet is there even here a similitude. Both surrendered their understandings to their ministers, upon the condition of subserviency to their personal desires. What George would have been in the age of Henry it might be ungracious to suppose; but it may be asserted that Henry, had he been reserved for the close of the eighteenth century, would have a very different place in opinion and history as a king and as a man,—such are the beneficent, humanising influences of knowledge, civilisation, the spirit of religious tolerance, and laws mutually guarding and guarded by public liberty!

The remains of George IV. were deposited in the royal vault at Windsor, with the accustomed solemnities, in the evening of the 16th of July.

INDEX.