In the third and concluding volume of the _Life and Reign of George
IV_., (a portion of Dr. Lardner's _Cabinet Library_,) we find the
following summary of the earthly career of the late King--shaded with
some admixture of severity, but, altogether, to be commended for the
manliness and unflinching spirit in which it is written. Our
contemporary biography sadly lacks vigorous and plain-speaking summaries
of character.
"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 characterized 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 eclat 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 civilization 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, humanizing
influences of knowledge, civilization, the spirit of religious
tolerance, and laws mutually guarding and guarded by public liberty!"
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