King George IV. was an older man than any of those we have commented on; indeed, he was a prematurely old man at sixty-five--feeling the shivers and the stings of his wild life: I suppose no one ever felt the approaches of age more mortifyingly. He had counted so much on being the fine gentleman to the last--such a height, such a carriage, such a grace! It was a dark day for him when his mirror showed wrinkles that his cosmetics would not cover, and a stoop in the shoulders which his tailors could not bolster out of sight. Indeed, in his later years he shrunk from exposure of his infirmities, and kept his gouty step out of reach of the curious, down at Windsor, where he built a cottage in a wood; and arranged his drives through the Park so that those who had admired this Apollo at his best should never know of his shakiness. Thither went his conclave of political advisers--sometimes Canning, the wonderful orator--sometimes the Duke of Wellington, with the honors of Waterloo upon him--sometimes young Sir Robert Peel, just beginning to make his influence felt; oftener yet, Charles Greville, whose memoirs are full of piquant details about the royal household--not forgetting that army of tailors and hair-dressers who did their best to assuage the misery and gratify the vanities of the gouty king. And when he died--which he hated exceedingly to do--in 1830, there came to light such a multitude of waistcoats, breeches, canes, snuff-boxes, knee-buckles, whips, and wigs, as I suppose were never heaped before around any man’s remains. The first gentleman in Europe could not, after all, carry these things with him. His brother, William IV., who succeeded him, was a bluff old Admiral--with not so high a sense of the proprieties of life as George; but honester even in his badnesses (which were very many) and, with all his coarseness and vulgarity, carrying a brusque, sailor-like frankness that half redeemed his peccadilloes. In those stormy times which belonged to the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, he showed nerve and pluck, and if he split the air pretty often with his oaths, he never offended by a wearying dilettanteism, or by foppery. In the year 1837 he died; and then and there began--within the memory of a good many of us old stagers--that reign of his young niece Victoria, daughter of his brother, the Duke of Kent (who had died seventeen years before)--which reign still continues, and is still resplendent with the virtues of the Sovereign and the well-being of her people.