It has been customary, I think, to underrate his abilities. Thackeray has a most misleading passage about his relation with the Whigs. “At first he made a pretence of having Burke and Fox and Sheridan for his friends. But how could such men be serious before such an empty scapegrace as this lad...; what had these men of genius in common with their tawdry young host of Carlton House? That fribble the leader of such men as Fox and Burke! That man’s opinions about the constitution--about any question graver than the button of a waistcoat or the sauce of a partridge worth anything! The friendship between the Prince and the Whig Chiefs was impossible. They were hypocrites in pretending to respect him, and if he broke the hollow compact between them, who shall blame him?” But if we turn to Creevey, we shall see that George played the game with the Whigs with consummate skill. Not that he cared a straw for the constitution or political matters. He wanted leisure, comfort, influence,--above all, money. He used the Whigs for his purposes in the question of the Regency, and in order to extort money from the nation. They were ready enough to serve him in defeating Pitt and their other opponents; but he, once he was Regent in 1812, with his father, the old King, hopelessly insane, flung them aside as no longer useful and made the Tory government uphold the two things now to his interest to conserve,--the _status quo_ and the power of the Crown. No one has ever doubted the power of fascination exercised by George, which was due not less to his clever adaptability, than to his high position. What reader of Lockhart’s “Life of Scott” can forget the dinner party when the King and Sir Walter exchanged mutual badinage in the freest manner? We find the same in Creevey regarding the extreme affability with which he treated him and the Whig leaders at Brighton, when Prince Regent. George’s charm of manner and the ease with which he could adapt himself to his company and forget to all appearance his royal dignity in social intercourse was one of his most powerful political assets which he used to the fullest advantage. The influence exercised by him was almost wholly evil. Head of the state in the days of its greatest military glory, when the moral and political influence of England was paramount in Europe; living in the days of great industrial and mechanical triumph, in which his country had the fullest share; confronted as King with some of the gravest social problems, which its poets and philosophers were taxing their utmost to expose and remove,--the marvel is that any man could have occupied such a position, and yet interested himself almost exclusively in frivolous pleasures and sensual amours.