mes of his people. Every verse of the ballad ends by
telling us what a good little king was this sovereign of Yvetot. With
certain slight alterations Beranger's satirical verses might {120} have
served as a picture of William the Fourth. But our good little King of
Yvetot was not destined altogether to have quite an easy time of it,
although he was more successful in that way than the monarch for whom
Beranger intended his satire. William had come in for the age of
reform. The whole course of English history hardly tells us of any
reign, of anything like equal length, into which so many reforms were
crowded. William the Fourth, we may be sure, would never have troubled
himself or any of his subjects about any projects of improvement in the
political or social conditions of his realm. He would have been quite
content to let things go on just as they had been going in the days
before he came to the throne, and would probably have asked no higher
title of affection from the loyalty of his subjects than the familiar
name that they gave him of the Sailor King. When for a while he began
to be called the Patriot King he must have associated the title with a
sense of all the worry and trouble brought upon him by the incessant
preparation of patriotic projects for the improvement of everything all
over the country.

[Sidenote: 1830-37--Lord Grey and William the Fourth]

It seems like a curious freak of fate that such a sovereign, at such a
time, should have had to get rid of the Duke of Wellington and accept
Lord Grey as his Prime Minister. The Duke of Wellington was himself
simple, plain, and occasionally rough in manners, with little taste for
Court ceremonial and little inclination for the exchange of stately
phrase and inflated language. There are many anecdotes told of
Wellington which show that he had no more liking or aptitude for the
ways dear to a Court functionary than King William himself had. Lord
Grey was a man of the most stately bearing and the most refined style.
His manner was courtly without the slightest affectation; he was
courtly by nature, and dignity was an element of his every-day
demeanor. He had been in constant companionship with some of the
greatest statesmen and orators of his time, but even his devotion to
Charles James Fox had never beguiled him into any of Fox's careless,
free-and-easy ways. He was sorely tried, as all {121} contemporary
accounts tell us, by the abrupt and overbearin