The eldest son of George III. had his comic aspect too, and was an excellent mimic. If we may believe the very respectable authority of Mr. Raikes, whose journals show him to have been a visitor at the Pavilion, and the intimate friend of many who visited there more frequently than himself, George IV., in playing the fool, was not at all scrupulous as to sacrificing his own ministers, for the sake of effect. Indeed, they were very good objects for the ridicule of a monarch who was his own jester. The “best wigged Prince in Christendom” had in perfection one of the chief qualities of the professional fool,--the power of imitation. Mr. Raikes affords an illustration of this in a story told him by the Duke of Wellington. “When the King sent for me,” said the Duke, “to form a new administration, in 1828, he was then seriously ill, though he would never allow it. I found him in bed, dressed in a dirty silk jacket and a turban night-cap, one as greasy as the other; for, notwithstanding his coquetry about dress in public, he was extremely slovenly and dirty in private. The first words he said to me were, ‘Arthur, the Cabinet is defunct;’ and then he began to describe the manner in which the late ministers had taken leave of him, in giving in their resignations. This was accompanied by the most ludicrous mimicry of the voice and manner of each individual, so strikingly like, that it was quite impossible to refrain from fits of laughter.” If George IV. was strong in the fool’s quality of mimicry, Louis Philippe was not less so in coarser mockery; but then the latter King was too grave an actor to allow of his playing the fool in presence even of a friend or minister. He, however, could indulge in a brief private performance of the character, and he was once unwittingly caught in the fact by one of his private secretaries, who had concealed himself behind a door, in order to escape the observation of the King. His Majesty was approaching in deep conversation with the old republican, Dupont de l’Eure. The monarch at the head of “the best of republics,” treated the aged confederate, of whom he wished to be well rid, with an excess of warmth and courtesy. Louis Philippe professed ideas liberal enough to gratify a republican so advanced as M. Dupont, of whom he finally took leave in the most condescending and friendly manner. “No sooner, however,” says Mr. Raikes, who was the confidant of the secretary, “had the other turned his back to go out, and before he quitted the room, than Louis Philippe began to hold up his finger at him, with a face of mockery, and made a movement with his foot, as if he could hardly prevent himself from kicking him.” This bit of pantomimic incivility was often the manner of the most comic of court fools, and probably Triboulet himself could not have enacted it in superior style.