‘When the king sent for me,’ said F.M. the Duke of Wellington to Raikes, ‘to form a new Administration in 1828, he was then seriously ill, though he would never allow it. I found him in bed, dressed in a dirty silk jacket and a turban night-cap, one as greasy as the other; for, notwithstanding his coquetry about dress in public, he was extremely slovenly and dirty in private. The first words he said to me were, “Arthur, the Cabinet is defunct;” and then he began to describe the manner in which the late Ministers had taken leave of him on giving in their resignations. This was accompanied by the most ludicrous mimicry of the voice and manner of each individual, so strikingly like that it was quite impossible to refrain from fits of laughter.’ This exhibition has been considered a proof of the king’s bad taste; which it may be allowed to be. But there was equal bad taste on the part of the Duke. If he had looked grave, the old bedridden prince-actor would have been rebuked. Moreover, the king was quite as capable and quite as willing to give an imitation of Arthur. Inimitable as the latter was in certain respects, there were certain peculiarities about him which the king would have hit off with as intense delight as he felt when mimicking his majesty’s servants, Viscounts Goderich and Palmerston. With George the Fourth’s successor there was no indisposition to joke, but the royal humour was of an ordinary quality. And yet it was eccentric too. King William would not, like his brother of Cambridge, have said to a chaplain at a public dinner, ‘Come, d---- it, do say _grace_, and let us begin!’ but he could not resist heightening a jest by a strong expletive; as, for instance, in the case of Captain and Mrs. Marryat, who were at a royal reception at the Pavilion, in King William’s time, and from which they were anxious to get away at a certain hour, in order to fulfil another engagement. Mrs. Marryat looked anxiously at the clock, and King William, catching her more than once in the fact, good-humouredly asked her the cause of her uneasiness. The lady frankly replied. ‘Well,’ said his majesty, ‘then why do you not leave at once?’ Mrs. Marryat had to inform him that it would be a breach of etiquette to leave the room while their majesties were still there. ‘Oh, d---- it!’ said the bluff monarch; ‘if that’s the case, come along o’ me; I’ll smuggle you out.’ On state occasions, however, a breach of etiquette would fairly take the king’s breath away. This is exemplified by what occurred at one of his first levées. Seeing an admiral, with whom he had been shipmate, bowing before him, the king cordially expressed his gladness at seeing his old comrade; adding, ‘and I hope you are quite well?’ The proper course would have been to simply answer the remark made. But the over-polite admiral replied, ‘Quite well, your majesty. I hope your majesty is well?’ The breach of etiquette was in making a remark to the king which implied the necessity of an answer.