"When he awoke that morning, he was in a bed at the Prince's hideous house at Brighton. You may see the place now for sixpence; they have fiddlers there every day, and sometimes buffoons and mountebanks hire the Riding-House and do their tricks and tumbling there. The trees are still there, and the gravel walks round which the poor old sinner was trotted." [Sidenote: CHARLES, DUKE OF NORFOLK] Very telling indignation, no doubt, but the gross defect of Thackeray's "Four Georges" is its want of sincerity. Sympathy is wasted on that Duke, who was one of the filthiest voluptuaries of his age, or of any other since that of Heliogabalus. Charles Howard, eleventh Duke of Norfolk, was not merely a bestial drunkard, like his father before him, capable of drinking all his contemporaries under the table; but was a swinish creature in every way. Gorging himself to repletion with food and drink, he would make himself purposely sick, in order to begin again. A contemporary account of him as a member of the Beefsteak Club described him as a man of huge unwieldy fatness, who, having gorged until he had eaten himself into incapacity for speaking or moving, would motion for a bell to be rung, when servants, entering with a litter, would carry him off to bed. It was well written of him: On Norfolk's tomb inscribe this placard: He lived a beast and died a blackguard. This "very old," "poor old man" of Thackeray's misplaced sympathy did not, as a matter of fact, live to a very great age. He died in 1815, aged sixty-nine. Practical joking was elevated to the status of a fine art at Brighton by the Prince and his merry men. A characteristic story of him is that told of a drive to Brighton races, when he was accompanied in his great yellow barouche by Townsend, the Bow Street runner, who was present to protect the Prince from insult or robbery at the hands of the multitude. "It was a position," says my authority, "which gave His Royal Highness an opportunity to practise upon his guardian a somewhat unpleasant joke. Turning suddenly to Townsend, just at the termination of a race, he exclaimed, 'By Jove, Townsend, I've been robbed; I had with me some damson tarts, but they are now gone.' 'Gone!' said Townsend, rising; 'impossible!' 'Yes,' rejoined the Prince, 'and you are the purloiner,' at the same time taking from the seat whereon the officer had been sitting the crushed crust of the asserted missing tarts, and adding, 'This is a sad blot upon your reputation as a vigilant officer.' 'Rather say, your Royal Highness, a sad stain upon my escutcheon,' added Townsend, raising the gilt-buttoned tails of his blue coat and exhibiting the fruit-stained seat of his nankeen inexpressibles." XXXV