The latter days of George IV. were sad, and for a king he was left comparatively alone. He had neither wife nor children to lean upon and to cheer him,--only mercenary courtiers and physicians. His tastes were refined, his manners affable, and his conversation interesting. He was intelligent, sagacious, and well-informed; yet no English monarch was ever more cordially despised. The governing principle of his life was a love of ease and pleasure, which made him negligent of his duties; and there never yet lived a man, however exalted his sphere, who had not imperative duties to perform, without the performance of which his life was a failure and a reproach. So it was with this unhappy king, who died like Louis XV. without any one to mourn his departure; and a new king reigned in his stead. And yet the reign of the fourth George as king was marked by returning national prosperity,--owing not to the efforts of statesmen and legislators, but to the marvellous spread of commerce and manufactures, resulting from the establishment of peace, thus opening a market for British goods in all parts of the world. This period of the fourth George's rule, as regent and king, was also remarkable for the appearance of men of genius in all departments of human thought and action. As the lights of a former generation sank beneath the horizon, other stars arose of increased brilliancy. In poetry alone, Byron, Scott, Rogers, Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, Keats, would have made the age illustrious,--a constellation such as has not since appeared. In fiction, Sir Walter Scott introduced a new era, soon followed by Bulwer, Dickens, and Thackeray. In the law there were Brougham, Eldon, Lyndhurst, Ellenborough, Denman, Plunkett, Erskine, Wetherell,--all men of the first class. In medicine and surgery were Abernethy, Cooper, Holland. In the Church were Parr, Clarke, Hampden, Scott, Sumner, Hall, Arnold, Irving, Chalmers, Heber, Whately, Newman. Sir Humphry Davy was presiding at the Royal Society, and Sir Thomas Lawrence at the Royal Academy. Herschel was discovering planets. Bell was lecturing at the new London University, and Dugald Stewart in the University of Edinburgh. Captain Ross was exploring the Northern Seas, and Lander the wilds of Africa. Lancaster was founding a new system of education; Bentham and Ricardo were unravelling the tangled web of political economy; Hallam, Lingard, Mitford, Mills, were writing history; Macaulay, Carlyle, Smith, Lockhart, Jeffrey, Hazlitt, were giving a new stimulus to periodical literature; while Miss Edgeworth, Jane Porter, Mrs. Hemans, were entering the field of literature as critics, poets, and novelists, instead of putting their inspired thoughts into letters, as bright women did one hundred years before. Into everything there were found some to cast their searching glances, creating an intellectual activity without previous precedent, if we except the great theological discussions of