Is there a way to have four horizontally sorted virtual desktops, but have the pager be vertical? I had this when i switched my panel to vertical and removed the horizontal pager, but after a reboot it was (logically gone).

Perhaps having a pager detached from the panel is the better option. (A horizontal 4-column pager is unusable for a vertical panel of course).

Thanks!

So, you want to move to the next desktop when you move the mouse to the edge of the desktop or use a keyboard shortcut like ctrl+alt+right, but have the pager display the desktops vertically?
I believe the pager has a configuration option for how many rows to display the desktops, which you can set to 4 and it should show 1 desktop in each row (the vertical layout).