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Home  »  Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men  »  George IV.

S.A. Bent, comp. Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men. 1887.

George IV.

  • [King of England, sometimes called “the first gentleman of Europe;” born Aug. 12, 1762; incurring the dislike of his father, attached himself to the opposition; appointed regent, 1811; continued the foreign policy of George III.; became king, 1820; Catholic emancipation carried, 1829; died June, 1830.]
  • I think I saw a very handsome sprinkling of the nobility.

  • When Prince of Wales, at Lewes races, where a few persons of quality got a drenching.
  • Of a heavy-stepping cavalry-officer at a Brighton ball, the prince said, “He might be sent back to America as a republication of the Stamp Act.”
  • On one occasion Sheridan told him that Fox sat beside Miss Pulteney at a public entertainment, cooing like a turtle-dove. George remarked, “There is nothing in it. I saw long ago that it was a coup manqué.”
  • He defended the existence of trial by jury in Cæsar’s time by quoting Suetonius: “JURE cæsus videtur.”
  • When a striking speech of Grattan in the Rotunda at Dublin was mentioned, “Nothing will do for Grattan,” said the prince, “but the ore rotundo.”
  • Sydney Smith once said that the Regent Orleans was the wickedest man that ever lived, and he was a prince: the English regent retorted, not without reason, “I should give the palm to his tutor, the Abbé Dubois, and he was a priest.”
  • “He has certainly attempted his life,” was George IV.’s judgment of Moore’s “Life of Sheridan,” which was said to have murdered its subject.
  • Wally, what is this? It is death, my boy: they have deceived me.

  • His last words; to his page, Sir Walthen Waller, who was assisting him to a seat, when the final qualm came.