nd venal applause as genuine tributes to
artistic genius. In the same way, and only in the same way, George the
Fourth sometimes believed himself to be playing a great part, and it
gratified his vanity to act the part out until it became tiresome to him
and he found it a relief to go back to the ordinary delights of his easy,
lazy, and sensuous nature. Perhaps the best that can be said of him is
that he had possibly some gifts which under other conditions might have
been turned to better account. Perhaps if he had had to work for a
living, to make a career in life for himself, to depend for his success
entirely on the steady use of his own best qualities, and to avoid the
idleness and self-indulgence which would have condemned him to perpetual
stint and poverty, he might have made a respectable name in some career
where intelligence and application count for much. But a hard fortune
had condemned him to be a king, and to begin by being the son of a king,
and thus to find as the years went on increasing opportunity of
gratifying all his meanest tastes and finding always around him the ready
homage which accords its applause to the most ignoble caprices and the
most wanton self-indulgence. The reign of George the Fourth saw great
deeds and great men; it could have seen few men in all his realm less
deserving a word of praise than George the Fourth.

[Sidenote: 1830--Events in the reign of George the Fourth]

The reign saw the beginning of many great enterprises in practical
science, the uprising of many philanthropic combinations, and the first
movements of political and social reform. It saw the earliest attempts
made in a systematic way towards the spread of education among the
multitude, and the close of many a bright career in literature and the
arts. Bishop Heber died in 1826. The death of Byron has already been
recorded in these pages, and at even an earlier period of the reign two
other stars of the first magnitude in the firmament of literature ceased
to shine upon the earth in bodily presence with the deaths of Keats and
Shelley. John Kemble, probably the greatest English tragic actor from
the days of Garrick to the uprising of Edmund Kean, died while George the
Fourth was {93} King. Sir Thomas Lawrence, Flaxman, Fuseli, and
Nollekens ceased to work for art. Sir Humphry Davy, Dugald Stewart, and
Pestalozzi were lost to science. The reign saw the foundation of the
Royal Society of Literature, which, to