ation has probably but a faint
memory of Felicia Hemans, whose verse had at one time an immense
popularity among all readers with whom sweetness of sentiment, musical
ease, fluency of verse, and simple tenderness of feeling were enough to
constitute poetic art. She, too, died not long before the close of the
reign. Many men who had won wide fame as pulpit orators and as religious
teachers of various orders marked by their deaths as well as by their
lives this chapter of history. Rowland Hill was one of these, the great
popular preacher, who flung aside conventionalities, and was ready to
preach anywhere if he had hope of gathering an audience around him whom
he could move and teach, whether he spoke from the pulpit of a church or
a chapel, or from a platform in the open air, or in the midst of a crowd
with no platform at all. Another was Robert Hall, admittedly one of the
most eloquent preachers of modern times. Yet another was Adam Clarke,
the author of the celebrated "Commentary on the Holy Scriptures." Of
course the fame of these men and women does not belong in the fuller
sense to the reign of William the Fourth. Some of them had wellnigh done
their work before the reign began, none of them can be said to have won
any new celebrity during the reign. Their names are introduced here
because their deaths were events of the moment and lend, in that way,
additional importance to the reign's history.

The fame of Mrs. Siddons can hardly be said to belong in any sense to the
days when William the Fourth sat on {285} the English throne, for she had
retired from the stage many years before his accession, and only appeared
in public on rare occasions and for some charitable object; but she died
within the reign, and it must therefore find another distinction by its
association with her name. Two years later died Edmund Kean, who also
may be said to have closed his career as an actor before the reign had
begun. Of the fame that is won on the boards of a theatre posterity can
only judge by hearsay. The poet, the novelist, the historian, the
philosopher, the painter, the sculptor, leave their works always living
behind them, and the later generation has the same materials on which to
form its judgment as were open to the world when the author or artist had
just completed his work. Even the orator can bequeath to all ages the
words he has spoken, although they are no longer to be accompanied by the
emphasis of his gest