Even though he retained it only for a short time, one cannot but admire the cleverness with which this Prince managed to win the friendship of many of the most gifted men of the day. Burke and Fox and Sheridan were his associates. Certainly, as Thackeray says, it was not his opinions about the constitution, or about the condition of Ireland, which they cared to hear--_that_ man's opinions, indeed! But he talked with Sheridan of dice, and with Fox of wine; those were interests which the fool and the geniuses had in common; and Beau Brummell's friend and rival was an authority among the fashionable men of the day on such questions as the suitable button for a waistcoat and the best sauce for a partridge. He even attached Moore to himself for a short time. From the tone of a letter which Moore writes to his mother in June 1811 (_Memoirs_, i. 225), we understand plainly that he feels flattered by the Prince Regent's "cordial familiarity." And the same is true for a moment of Byron; his letter of reconciliation to Sir Walter Scott shows how susceptible he was to the Regent's flatteries on the subject of _Childe Harold_. And Scott himself! Good, honourable gentleman though he was, in his capacity of obstinate Tory he was always the Regent's faithful liegeman. And when the latter, as King George the Fourth, came to Scotland (where he figured in the dress of a Highland chief, with his fat legs bared and a kilt round his enormous body, as satirically described by Byron at the end of _The Age of Bronze_), Scott went on board the royal yacht to welcome him, seized a glass from which his Majesty had just drunk, begged to be allowed to keep it, vowed that it should remain for ever as an heirloom in his family, clapped it in his pocket, and, finding an unexpected guest when he went home, sat down upon it, and was quickly and painfully reminded of the royal keepsake. Scott continued faithful to George IV. long after Moore had riddled him with the darts of his wit, and Byron lashed him with his savage epigrams, and after even Brummell, walking in Hyde Park, had looked at him through his eye-glass and asked the Prince's companion, "Who is _your fat friend_?"