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.

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