CHARLES. DUKE OF NORFOLK 261 



announced, he staggered to it as well as he could, and, 

 stumbling in, bade the postilions drive to Arundel. 



" They drove him for half an hour round and round 

 the Pavilion lawn ; the poor old man fancied he was 

 going home. 



" When he awoke that morning, he was in a bed 

 at the Prince's hideous house at Brighton. You may 

 see the place now for sixpence ; they have fiddlers 

 there everv dav, and sometimes buffoons and mounte- 

 banks hire the Riding-House and do their tricks and 

 tumbling there. The trees are still there, and the 

 gravel walks round which the poor old sinner was 

 trotted." 



Very telling indignation, no doubt, but the gross 

 defect of Thackeray's " Four Georges " is its want of 

 sincerity. Sympathy is wasted on that Duke, who 

 was one of the filthiest voluptuaries of his age, or of 

 any other since that of Heliogabalus. Charles Howard, 

 eleventh Duke of Norfolk, was not merely a bestial 

 drunkard, like his father before him, capable of drinking 

 all his contemporaries under the table ; but was a 

 swinish creature in every way. Gorging himself to 

 repletion with food and drink, he would make himself 

 purposely sick, in order to begin again. A contem- 

 porary account of him as a member of the Beefsteak 

 Club described him as a man of huge unwieldy fatness, 

 who, having gorged until he had eaten himself into 

 incapacity for speaking or moving, would motion for a 

 bell to be rung, when servants, entering with a litter, 

 would carrv him off to bed. It was well written of 



%j 



him : 



On Norfolk's tomb inscribe tbis placard : 

 He lived a beast and died a blackguard. 



This " very old," " poor old man " of Thackeray's 

 misplaced sympathy did not, as a matter of fact, live 

 to a very great age. He died in 1815, aged sixty-nine. 



Practical joking was elevated to the status of a 

 fine art at Brighton by the Prince and his merry men. 

 A characteristic story of him is that told of a drive to 

 Brighton races, when he was accompanied in his great 



