close and personal.  The progress of architecture was sudden and astonishing, during the epoch which will bear his name.  London, before his accession to the executive power, was a rich, populous, elegantly built capital, but without a due proportion of prominent structures characterized by architectural grandeur, beauty, or curiosity.  In a few years magnificent lines and masses of building were begun and completed; but they were mainly the growth of wealth, vanity, speculation, and peace.  Where his influence was directly felt it proved unfortunate.  He lavished millions in creating vicious models, and fantastic styles of architecture, and brought into fashion artists without capacity or taste.  There was not in his kingdom a more discerning judge of painting; but he had no imagination for the higher class of art.  He preferred the exquisite and humorous realities of the Dutch painters to the poetic or historic schools of Italy; and, though a studious collector, he gave no great impulse to native talent.  In music he had both taste and skill:  he encouraged an art which formed one of his enjoyments; and if his patronage has brought forth no composer of the first order, the cause may exist in some circumstances of national inaptitude.

“It is necessary to go back some centuries for an English king to whom he bears the nearest likeness in ensemble of character.  The parallel at first sight may be thought injurious, but the likeness will upon consideration be found striking and complete.  George IV. had in his youth the eclat of personal endowment, education, and accomplishment,—­ of success in the fashionable exercises and graces of his age,—­and of that reckless prodigality which obtains popular homage and applause in a prince.  Henry VIII. in his youth was one of the most brilliant personages of Europe.  A fine person,—­the accomplishments of his time in literature and the arts,—­the display of gorgeous prodigality,—­raised him to a sort of chivalrous rivalry with Francis I. In mental culture he excelled George IV., who owes much of his reputation for capacity and acquirement to an imposing manner, and the eagerness to applaud a prince:  stripped of this charm, his ideas and language appeared worse than common when he put them on paper.  Both had the same dominant ambition to be distinguished and imitated, as the arbiters of fashion in dress for the costliness, splendour, or novelty of their toilet.  Henry VIII. and George IV. surrounded themselves with the men most distinguished for wit and talent, with a remarkable coincidence of motive, as ministering to their vanity or pleasures; but as soon as they became troublesome or useless, both cast them off with the same careless indifference.  Henry VIII., it is true, sacrificed to his own caprices, or to court intrigue, the lives of those whom he had chosen for his social familiarity;—­whilst George IV. merely turned off his so called friends, and thought of them no more.  But such is the difference