In 1811, George the III. was a second time a lunatic, and the Prince ascended his throne, though only with the title of Regent, which he did not change for that of King until 1820, when the nominal monarch died, having survived his reason for nearly ten years. Ten years longer did the Fourth George sway the sceptre of the noblest empire in the world; and then he too mingled with the same dust as the meanest of his subjects. "C'est ainsi," in the words of Bossuet, "que la puissance divine, justement irritée centre notre orgueil, le pousse jusqu' au néant, et que, pour égaler á jamais les conditions, elle ne fait de nous tous qu' une même cendre." During the last years of his life, George the IVth was the prey of various maladies, with which a remarkably strong constitution enabled him to struggle until the spring of 1830. His corporeal sufferings may have been one cause of his almost entire seclusion at Windsor Castle, where he was like the Grand Lama of Thibet, unseeing and unseen, except by a chosen few, but it cannot be doubted that the knowledge of the unpopularity under which he certainly laboured, had some effect in producing the slight communication which took place between him and his subjects. So notorious was his aversion to making an appearance in London, that when he was first announced, last April, to be seriously indisposed, it was rumoured for a time that the sickness was fictitious--a mere pretence to avoid holding a levee which had been fixed for a certain day in that month, and which was in consequence deferred. But before the period had arrived to which it was postponed, there was no longer a doubt that the angel of death was brandishing his dart, and that there was little chance of averting the threatened stroke. The bulletins which the royal physicians daily promulgated, though couched in equivocal and unsatisfactory terms, shadowed out impending dissolution. The reason of their ambiguity was currently believed to be the circumstance, that the King insisted upon reading the newspapers in which they were published; whilst the medical attendants were anxious to withhold from him a knowledge of his true situation.