GEORGE IV. AND WILLIAM IV. 127 



and more to the phase or phases which it has 

 now assumed, though there was a greater tendency, 

 one would say, towards idiotcy and towards a 

 choice of such names as do not so much connect 

 sireship and damship in the form of appellation as 

 recall some personage or event or published work 

 or novelty of any kind, leading to such slangy 

 designations, in course of time, as ' All-my-eye,' for 

 a son of Betty Martin, or the ' All-round-my-hat,' 

 and * Here-I-go-with-my-eye-out ' of the elegant 

 Lord George Bentinck, who was ' the glass of 

 fashion and the mould of form ' in the early years 

 of Queen Victoria. 



To the reign of George IV. belongs the story, 

 which has been too often told to need or to bear 

 circumstantial evolution, of Mr. John Mytton, 

 commonly called Jack Mytton, of Halston, Salop, 

 who in that reign reached the zenith of his fame, 

 as a sportsman, racer, athlete, and general mad- 

 man, and dropped from it like a falling star, not 

 upon ' Lemnos the ^gean isle,' but into the 

 debtors' prison, where he lived (in drink, when he 

 could get it) for the short remainder of his days, 

 and died in misery at the early age of thirty-eight. 

 This was very nearly the same age at which the 



