All high-spirited young England flocked to the side of the Prince of Wales. He was the Grand Master of Corinthianism and Tom-and-Jerryism. It was he who peopled these roads with a numerous and brilliant concourse of whirling travellers, where before had been only infrequent plodders amidst the Sussex sloughs. To his princely presence, radiant by the Old Steyne, hasted all manner of people; prince and prizefighter, statesman and nobleman; beauties noble and ignoble, and all who _lived_ their lives. There he made incautious guests helplessly drunk on the potent old brandy he called "Diabolino," and then exposed them in embarrassing situations; and there--let us remember it--he entertained, and was the beneficent patron of, the foremost artists and literary men of his age. The _Zeitgeist_ (the Spirit of the Time) resided in, was personified in, and radiated from him. He was the First Gentleman in Europe, but is to us, in the perspective of a hundred years or so, something more: the type and exemplar of an age. He should have been endowed with perennial youth, but even his splendid vitality faded at last, and he grew stout. Leigh Hunt called him a "fat Adonis of fifty," and was flung into prison for it; and prison is a fitting place for a satirist who is stupid enough to see a misdemeanour in those misfortunes. No one who could help it would be fat, or fifty. Besides, to accuse one royal personage of being fat is to reflect upon all: it is an accompaniment of royalty. Thackeray denounced his wig; but there is a prejudice in favour of flowing locks, and the King gracefully acknowledged it. One is not damned for being fat, fifty, and wearing a wig; and it seems a curious code of morality that would have it so; for although we may not all lose our hair nor grow fat, we must all, if we are not to die young, grow old and pass the grand climacteric. There has been too much abuse of the Regency times. Where modern moralists, folded within their little sheep-walks from observation of the real world, mistake is in comparing those times with these, to the disadvantage of the past. They know nothing of life in the round, and seeing it only in the flat, cannot predicate what exists on the other side. To them there is, indeed, no other side, and things, despite the poet, _are_ what they seem, and nothing else.