, so long as the blood moved ever so little in his veins,
he was still a king, expressing a desire that the dutiful feeling and
admirable taste of the Prelate should receive a suitable acknowledgment.
It would have been impossible for a real monarch like George, even after
the gout had turned his thoughts heavenward, really to abase himself
before his Maker. But he could, so to say, treat with Him, as he might
have treated with a fellow-sovereign, in a formal way, long after
diplomacy was quite useless. How strange it must be to be a king! How
delicate and difficult a task it is to judge him! So far as I know,
no attempt has been made to judge King George the Fourth fairly. The
hundred and one eulogies and lampoons, irresponsibly published during
and immediately after his reign, are not worth a wooden hoop in Hades.
Mr. Percy Fitzgerald has published a history of Georges reign, in which
he has so artistically subordinated his own personality to his subject,
that I can scarcely find, from beginning to end of the two bulky
volumes, a single opinion expressed, a single idea, a single deduction
from the admirably-ordered facts. All that most of us know of George
is from Thackeray's brilliant denunciation. Now, I yield to few in my
admiration of Thackeray's powers. He had a charming style. We never
find him searching for the mot juste as for a needle in a bottle of hay.
Could he have looked through a certain window by the river at Croisset
or in the quadrangle at Brasenose, how he would have laughed! He blew on
his pipe, and words came tripping round him, like children, like pretty
little children who are perfectly drilled for the dance, or came, did he
will it, treading in their precedence, like kings, gloomily. And I think
it is to the credit of the reading mob that, by reason of his beautiful
style, all that he said was taken for the truth, without questioning.
But truth after all is eternal, and style transient, and now that
Thackeray's style is becoming, if I may say so, a trifle 1860, it may
not be amiss that we should inquire whether his estimate of George is in
substance and fact worth anything at all. It seems to me that, as in his
novels, so in his history of the four Georges, Thackeray made no attempt
at psychology. He dealt simply with types. One George he insisted upon
regarding as a buffoon, another as a yokel. The Fourth George he chose
to hold up for reprobation as a drunken, vapid cad. Every action, every
phas