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 between
barbarism and tyranny on the one side, and civilization and freedom on
the other: that which was death in the former, is but court disgrace in
the latter. George IV. was not cruel--he had even a certain
susceptibility; the spectacle of human suffering revolted him: but
suffering to affect him must have been present to his sense. Was Henry
VIII. gratuitously cruel? That does not appear. He took no pleasure for
itself in shedding blood, and avoided being a witness of it. Had he been
obliged to look on whilst Anne Boleyn and Sir Thomas More were bleeding,
he probably would have spared them. He sacrificed them to his impulses
from mere selfish indifference. With their wives and mistresses Henry
VIII. and George IV. were governed by the same self-indulgent
despotism--the same animal disgusts. Henry VIII. had six wives, and sent
one to the scaffold as the prelude to his marriage with another. George
IV. had only one wife, but she suffered the persecutions of six; and if
she escaped decapitation or divorce, it was from no failure of
inclination or instruments. Henry VIII. was the tyrant of his people,
and George IV. was not: yet is there even here a similitude. Both
surrendered their understandings to their ministers, upon the condition
of subserviency to their personal desires. What George would have been