It is unnecessary to give a detailed description of the whole of the apartments of the Pavilion, or the furniture therein; it will suffice to say that with the exception of the Chinese Gallery, and the suite of rooms which forms the east front, there was not, while it remained Royal property, a room that would content any commoner of substance. The throne room, with its tawdry adjuncts, was vile in taste and of meagre proportions; wholly devoid of the grandeur and nobleness which should attach itself to Royalty. A casual observer of the present day would be led to suppose that the apartment was the lodge-room of some benefit society, or the smoking crib of George IV., the raised canopied dais being appointed for the chairman at Lodge Meetings, or for His Gracious Majesty when he presided over his Royal Pavilion midnight orgies. The whole of the King’s Apartments, as they were designated, were of a like character; but they afforded him a contentment, inasmuch, as, from his bedroom,—by the secret stairs to which the bloated Marchioness of Conyngham descended from her chamber,—to the capacious marble bath where his Majesty laved, there was a seclusion to which in his later years he became habituated. The upper rooms of the Pavilion, are, for a Palace, low pitched, of very contracted dimensions, and from two windows alone, those in the large dome, is a sufficient view of the sea obtained to permit of the building being termed a Marine Pavilion. The furniture throughout the building was costly in the extreme, but incongruous. Huish, in his “Memoirs of George IV.,” says:—“Nothing could exceed the indignation of the people, when the Civil List came before Parliament in May, 1816, and £50,000 were found to have been expended in furniture at Brighton, immediately after £534,000 had been voted for covering the excess of the Civil List, occasioned entirely by the reckless extravagance of the Prince Regent, whose morning levees were not attended by men of science and of genius, who could have instilled into his mind wholesome notions of practical economy; but the tailor, the upholsterer, the jeweller, and the shoemaker were the regular attendants of his morning recreations.” On one of these occasions his servant entered his apartment at the Pavilion with the information, “_She_ is come, your Royal Highness.” “She!” exclaimed the Prince, “who is _she_?” “_She_ is come,” repeated the servant. “I ask,” replied the Prince in an angry tone, “who is _she_?—where does _she_ come from?” “It is _Shea_ the tailor, from London, your Royal Highness.” The Prince smiled, and the _Shea_ was admitted immediately into the royal presence. Irrespective of the great alterations and improvements at the Royal Pavilion marking an epoch for Brighton, in 1817, that year is also memorable in the town for the 5th of November riot, which then took place, referred to in page 114, and thus satirised by Thomas Herbert:—{271}