have loved him except Mrs. Fitzherbert alone, and we have seen
how that love was repaid. Even those who were most devoted to him in his
later years, because of their devotion to the royal house and to the
State of which he was the representative, found themselves compelled to
bear the heaviest testimony against his levity, his selfishness, his lack
of conscience, his utter indifference to all the higher objects and
purposes of life.

George must have had some natural talents and some {90} gifts of
intellect, for he would otherwise not have chosen such friends as those
whom in his better days he chose out and brought around him. We are told
that he had marvellous powers of conversation, that he had a ready wit,
and a keen insight into the humors and the weaknesses of those with whom
he was compelled to associate. We are told that he could compete in
repartee with the recognized wits of his time, and that he could shine as
a talker even among men whose names still live in history because of
their reputations as talkers. Of course it will naturally occur to the
mind that the guests of the Prince Regent might be easily inclined to
discover genuine wit in any repartee which came from the Prince Regent,
but it is certain that some at least of the men who surrounded him were
not likely to have been betrayed into admiration merely because of the
rank of their royal entertainer. Burke was held to have spoken
disparagingly of George when he described him as "brilliant but
superficial." To one of Burke's deep thought and wide information a man
might well have seemed superficial in whom others nevertheless believed
that they saw evidences of intellect and understanding, but if Burke
thought a man brilliant it is only reasonable to assume that that man's
conversation must have had frequent flashes of brilliancy.

[Sidenote: 1830--The Third and Fourth Georges contrasted]

Undoubtedly George was capable sometimes of appreciating thoroughly the
qualities of greatness in other men, but the appreciation never left any
abiding influence upon his character or his career. He certainly did not
make himself the cause of so much injury to the best interests of the
State as George the Third had done, but it has also to be observed that
when George the Third went wrong and obstinately maintained a wrongful
course he was acting in dogged obedience to what he believed to be his
conscience and the teachings of his creed. George the Fourth