THE NEW SCHOOL 55 



excused himself laughingly afterwards to the Duke of 

 Wellington by saying it was ' a little bit of Newmarket.' 

 But with his racing career and its vicissitudes, with his 

 debts and his indiscretions, with the sincerity of his selfish- 

 ness and the half-heartedness of his attachments and his 

 friendships, these pages have no concern. For all these 

 things, and more also, he has been apostrophised and trounced 

 by Mr. Thackeray with an energy which, to my mind, 

 damages the hterary and critical perfection of the last of 

 the 'Four Georges.' Considering, too, that Mr. Thackeray 

 felt him to be a dressed-up sawdust marionette, it seemed 

 hardly worth his pains. Many of the foibles to which his 

 critic brings a cudgel would have been better chastened 

 with a riding whip. Let us remember that a very charming 

 woman dignified him by her disinterested and abiding affec- 

 tion, and that the Duke of Wellington, who had the meanest 

 opinion of his judgment and found him a difficult man to do 

 business with, declared him to be very clever and amusing. 



At all events, stag-hunters of the first fifty years of this 

 century owe much to George IV. He brought Charles Davis 

 to Ascot : he insisted upon a fast foxhound pack. In Charles 

 Davis, as we shall presently see, he promoted the right man 

 to form and educate a new school of stag-hunters. 



The king can certainly have seen little of the hounds 

 in the field after Davis's appointment ; but I dare say he 

 saw them now and again in kennel. He told a Newmarket 

 trainer one day at Ascot that he was very happy with his 

 hounds and his Virginia Water. He used to drive himself 

 about the Park and Ascot and Swinley. There is a picture of 

 him in Huish's Memoir, driving away from the Sandpit gate, 

 where he had a menagerie of the better-disposed wild animals. 

 He is in his pony phaeton, sitting well up in a tight ' double- 



1 Mr. Cobden, whose family have been estabhshed in Windsor as tailors to 

 the Crown since the reign of George III., tells me that his grandfather used to 



