10 THE BRIGHTON ROAD 



statesman and nobleman ; beauties noble and ignoble, 

 and all who lived their lives. There he made incautious 

 guests helplessly drunk on the potent old brandy he 

 called " Diabolino," and then exposed them in 

 embarrassing situations ; and there — let us remember 

 it — he entertained, and was the beneficent patron of, 

 the foremost artists and literary men of his age. The 

 Zeitgeist (the Spirit of the Time) resided in, was 

 personified in, and radiated from him. He was the 

 First Gentleman in Europe, but is to us, in the perspec- 

 tive of a hundred years or so, something more : the 

 type and exemplar of an age. 



He should have been endowed with perennial youth, 

 but even his splendid vitality faded at last, and he 

 grew stout. Leigh Hunt called him a " fat Adonis of 

 fifty," and was flung into prison for it ; and prison is 

 a fitting place for a satirist who is stupid enough to see 

 a misdemeanour in those misfortunes. No one who 

 could help it would be fat, or fifty. Besides, to accuse 

 one royal personage of being fat is to reflect upon all : 

 it is an accompaniment of royalty. 



Thackeray denounced his wig ; but there is a 

 prejudice in favour of flowing locks, and the King 

 gracefully acknowledged it. One is not damned for 

 being fat, fifty, and wearing a wig ; and it seems a 

 curious code of morality that would have it so ; for 

 although we may not all lose our hair nor grow fat, 

 we must all, if we are not to die young, grow old and 

 pass the grand climacteric. 



There has been too much abuse of the Regency 

 times. Where modern moralists, folded within their 

 little sheep-walks from observation of the real world, 

 mistake is in comparing those times with these, to 

 the disadvantage of the past. They know nothing of 

 life in the round, and seeing it only in the flat, cannot 

 predicate what exists on the other side. To them 

 there is, indeed, no other side, and things, despite the 

 poet, are what they seem, and nothing else. 



They lash the manners of the Regency, and think 

 they are dealing out punishment to a bygone state of 



