utter falsehood of the denial which
he had given to the reports that a marriage ceremony had taken place
between them--a falsehood which, be it remembered, he had declared to
Charles Fox upon his honor to be a truthful statement. The moralist may
be a little puzzled how to make up his mind as to the bearing of this
incident upon the character of George the Fourth. Does it relieve the
murky gloom of George's life by one streak of light if we find that,
after all, he did love Mrs. Fitzherbert to the last, and that in his
dying moments he wished her portrait to go with him to the tomb? Or does
it darken the stain upon the man's life to know that he really did love
the woman whom nevertheless he could deliberately consign {89} to an
infamous imputation? We do not know whether any writer of romance has
ventured to introduce into his pages an incident and a problem such as
those which are thus associated with the death-bed of George the Fourth.
It is something to know that the King's brother, the Duke of Clarence,
whom that death-bed had made King of England, was kind and generous to
Mrs. Fitzherbert, and did all in his power to atone to her for the trials
which her love and her royal lover had brought upon her life.

George was in his sixty-eighth year when he died. It would not be easy
to find anywhere the story of a life which left so little of good to be
remembered. George seems to have had some generous impulses now and
then, and he probably did some kindly acts which could be set off against
his many errors, imperfections, ignoble selfishnesses, and grave
offences. But the record of his career as history gives it to us is that
of a life almost absolutely surrendered to self-indulgence. It is only
fair to remember when we consider all the unworthy acts of his manhood
that the unwise and harsh restraints imposed upon him in his early years
are accountable, at least to a certain extent, for the follies and the
vices to which he yielded himself up when he became, as Byron says of one
of his characters, "Lord of himself, that heritage of woe." Heritage of
woe it certainly was in the case of George the Fourth. In his early
manhood he appears to have had the gift of forming close friendships with
men of genius and of noble impulse, but their example never told upon
him, and as one cause or other removed them from his side his career bore
with it no trace of their influence or their inspiration. No one ever
seems to