"It is now sixteen or seventeen years," says Edmund Burke, in that famous passage to which one is almost ashamed to allude any more, so hackneyed has it been, "since first I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision." That glowing, impassioned apostrophe did more to make partisans and admirers for poor Marie Antoinette among all English-speaking peoples, probably for all time, than any charms, or virtues, or misfortunes of the Queen and the woman could have done. I can never of late read or recall to mind the burning words of Burke, without thinking of a certain day in March some seven years ago, when I stood on a platform in Trafalgar Square, London, and saw a bright, beautiful young face smiling and bending to a vast enthusiastic crowd on either side, and I, like everybody else, was literally stricken with admiration of the beauty, the sweetness, and the grace of the Princess Alexandra of Denmark. In truth, I am not in general an enthusiast about princes or princesses; I do not believe that the king's face usually gives grace. In this instance the beauty of the Princess Alexandra had been so noisily trumpeted by literary lacqueys already, that one's natural instinct was to feel disappointed, and to say so, when the Princess herself came in sight. But it was impossible to feel disappointment, or anything but admiration, at the sight of that bright, fair face, so transparent in the clearness of its complexion, so delicate and refined in its outlines, so sweet and gracious in its expression. I think something like the old-fashioned, chivalric, chimerical feeling of personal loyalty must have flamed up for the moment that day in the hearts of many men, who perhaps would have been ashamed to confess that their first experience of such an emotion was due to a passing glimpse of the face of a pretty, tremulous girl.

If ours were days of augury, men might have shuddered at the omens which accompanied the wedding ceremonies of the Prince and Princess of Wales. When Goethe, then a youth, surveyed the preparations for the reception of Marie Antoinette at Strasbourg, on her way to Paris, he observed significantly on the inauspicious fact that in the grand chamber adorned for her coming, the tapestry represented the wedding of Jason and Medea. The civil authorities of London certainly did not greet the fair stranger with any such grisly and ghastly emblazonings; but there were other and even more inauspicious omens offered by chance and the hour. The sky darkened, a dreary wind whistled; presently the rain came down in drenching streams that would not abate. There was a mourning-garb at the wedding—the black dress of the Queen, who would not lay aside her widow's-weeds even for that hour; and the night of the wedding, when the streets of London were illuminated, the crowd was so great that, as on a memorable occasion in the early married life of Marie Antoinette, people were crushed and trampled to death amid the universal jubilation.

Well, we defy augury, with Hamlet. But I think some at least in the crowd who welcomed Alexandra felt a kind of doubt and pity as to her future, which needed no inspiration from omens and superstition. No foreign princess has ever been so popular in England as Alexandra; and assuredly some at least of the affection felt for her springs from a pity which, whether called for or not, is genuine and universal. The last time I saw the Princess of Wales was within a very few days of my leaving England to visit the United States. It was in Drury Lane Theatre, then fitted up as an opera house in consequence of the recent burning of Her Majesty's Theatre. The Prince of Wales, his wife, and one of his sisters were in their box. I had not seen the Princess for some time, and I was painfully impressed with the change which had come over her. Remembering, as it was easy to do, the brightness of her beauty during the early days of her marriage, there was something almost shocking in the altered appearance of her face. It looked wasted and haggard; the complexion, which used to be so dazzlingly fair, had grown dull, and, if I may say so, discolored; and I must be ungracious enough to declare bluntly that, to my eyes at least, there seemed little trace indeed of the beauty of a few years before left in that dimmed and worn countenance. "Only the eyes remained—they would not go." Of course, it must be remembered that the Princess was then only just recovering from a long, painful, and exhausting illness; and she may have—I truly hope she has—since then regained all her brightness and beauty. In any case, it would be unjust indeed to assume that the wasted look of the Princess was to be attributed to domestic unhappiness. But even a very matter-of-fact and unsentimental person, looking at her then, and remembering what she so lately was, might be excused if he fancied that some of the unpropitious omens which surrounded the Princess's marriage had already begun to justify themselves in practical fulfilment.

For even at the time of the marriage of the Prince and Princess there were not wanting prophets of evil who predicted that this royal union would not prove much happier than state-made marriages commonly are. Even then there were stories and reports afloat which ascribed to the Prince habits and tendencies not likely to promote the domestic happiness of a delicate and refined young wife, hardly more than a mere child in years. Indeed, there was already considerable doubt in the public mind as to the personal character of the Prince of Wales. He certainly did not look a very intellectual or refined sort of person even then, and some at least were inclined to think him, as Steerforth says of little Em'ly's lover, "rather a chuckle-headed kind of fellow," to get such a girl. There was, certainly, a breath of serious distrust abroad. On the Prince's coming of age, and again, I think, on the announcement of his approaching marriage, the London daily papers had set themselves to preaching sermons at him; and a very foolish chorus of sermons that was which broke out from all those tongues together. The only marked effect of this outburst of lay-preaching was, I fancy, to impress the public mind with the idea that the Prince was really a very much more dreadful young man than there was any good reason to believe him. People naturally imagined that the writers who poured forth such eloquent, wise, and suggestive admonitions must know a great deal more than they felt disposed to hint at; whereas, I venture to think that, in truth, the majority of the writers were disposed to hint at a great deal more than they knew. For, indeed, almost all that is generally and substantially known of the Prince of Wales has been learned and observed since his marriage.

Still, even before, and long before the marriage, there were ominous rumors. Those that I mention I give simply as rumors—not, indeed, the mere babble of the streets, but as the kind of thing which people told you who professed to know—the talk of the House of Commons, and the clubs, and the fashionable drawing-rooms and smoking-rooms. People told you that the Prince and his father had had many quarrels arising out of the extravagance, dissipation, and wrong-headedness of the former; and there was even a painful and cruel report thus whispered about that the death of Prince Albert was the result of a cold he had taken from walking incautiously in a heavy rain during excitement caused by a quarrel with his son. Stories were told of this and that amour and liaison in Ireland when the Prince of Wales was with the camp on the Curragh of Kildare; of his excesses when he was a student at the University; of his escapades at many other times and places. Certain actresses of a low class, and other women of a still lower class, were pointed out in London as special favorites of the Prince of Wales. Of course every man of sense knew, first, that stories of this kind must be taken with a large amount of allowance for exaggeration; and, next, that the public must not expect all the virtues of a saint to belong to the early years of a prince of the family of Guelph. In England public opinion, although it has grown much more exacting of late years on the score of decorum than it used to be, is still disposed to look over without censure a good deal of extravagance and dissipation in young and unmarried men, especially if they be men of rank. Therefore, if the rumors which attended the early career of the Prince of Wales had not followed him into his married years, the world would soon have forgotten all about his youthful indiscretions. But it became a serious question for the whole nation when it began to be whispered everywhere that the Prince was growing worse instead of better during his married life, and when to the suspicion that he was wasting his own youth and his own credit came to be added the belief that he was neglecting and injuring the young and beautiful woman whom state reasons had assigned to him as a wife. In good truth, it is really a question of public and historical interest whether the Queen of England is likely to be succeeded by an Albert the Good or another George the Fourth; and I am not therefore inviting the readers of The Galaxy to descend to the useless discussion of a mere piece of idle court scandal when I ask them to consider with me the probabilities of the future from such survey as we can take of the aspects of the present.

Those who saw the Prince of Wales when he visited this country, would surely fail to recognize the slender, fair-haired, rather graceful youth of that day in the heavy, fat, stolid, prematurely bald, elderly-young-man of this. It would not be easy to see in any assembly a more stupid-looking man than the Prince of Wales is now. On horseback he shows to best advantage. He rides well, and the pleasure he takes in riding lends something of animation to his usually inexpressive face. But when his eyes and features lapse into their habitual condition of indolent, good-natured, stolid repose, all light of intellect seems to have been banished. The outline of the head and face, and the general expression, seemed to me of late to be growing every day more and more like the head and face of George the Third. Anybody who may happen to have a shilling or half-crown of George the Third's time, can see on the coin a very fair presentment of the countenance of the present heir-apparent of the English throne. Whether the Prince of Wales resembles George the Fourth in character and tastes or not, he certainly does not resemble him in face. Even a court sycophant could not pretend to see beauty or grace in our present Prince.

I think that to the eye of the cynic or the satirist the Prince of Wales shows to greatest advantage when he sits in his box at an advanced hour of some rather heavy classic opera, or has to endure a long succession of speeches at a formal public dinner. The heavy head droops, the heavy jaws hang, the languid eyes close, the heir-apparent sinks into a doze. Loyalty itself can see nothing dignified or kingly in him then. I have watched him thus as he sat in his box during some high-class, and to him, doubtless, very heavy performance at the Italian opera, and have thought that at times he might remind irreverent and disloyal observers of Pickwick's immortal fat boy. I have sometimes observed that his little dozes appeared to afford innocent amusement to his sisters, if any of them happened to be in the box; and occasionally one of the Princesses would playfully poke her slumbering brother in the princely ribs, and the Heir of all the Ages would open his eyes and smile languidly, and try to look at the stage and listen to the music; and then, after a while, the heavy head would sink once more on the vast expanse of shirt-front in which the Prince seems to delight, and the fat boy would go to sleep again. But this would only happen at certain performances. There were times when the Prince had eyes and ears open and attentive, even in the opera house. His tastes in general, however, are not for high art in music or the drama. He is very fond of the little theatres where the vivacious blondes display their unconcealed attractions. There are, as everybody knows, several minor theatres in London where the audience, or, I should say more properly, the spectators, will be found to consist chiefly of men, while, on the other hand, the performers are chiefly women. These are the temples of the leg drama. "PiÈce aux jambes? PiÈce aux cuisses!" indignantly exclaims Eugene Pelletan, denouncing such performances in his "Nouvelle Babylone"; and he goes on to add some cumulative illustrations which I omit. Well, the Prince of Wales loves the piÈce aux jambes, and the theatres where it flourishes. He constantly visits theatres at which his wife and sisters are never seen, and in which it would be idle to deny that there are actresses who have made themselves conspicuous objects of popular scandal.

Now, I am far from saying that this necessarily implies anything worse than a low taste on the part of the Prince of Wales. But there are stations in life which render private bad taste a public sin. In London, of late, there has been a just outcry against a certain kind of theatrical performance. It is held to be demoralizing and degrading that the stage should be made simply a show-place for the exhibition of half-naked women, for the audacious display of legs and bosoms. Now, I beg to say for myself that I have entire faith in the dramatic as in every other art; that I believe it always when truthfully pursued vindicates itself, and that I think any costume which the true and legitimate needs of the drama require is fitting, proper, and modest. I regard the ballet, in its place, as a graceful and delightful entertainment; and I do not believe that any healthy and pure mind ought to be offended by the kind of costume which the dance requires. But artists and moralists in London alike objected, and justly objected, to performances the whole purpose, and business, and attraction of which was the exhibition of a crowd of girls as nearly naked as they could venture to show themselves in public.

Now this was undoubtedly the kind of exhibition which the Prince of Wales especially favored and patronized. Night after night, even during the long and lamentable illness of his young wife, he visited such theatres, and gazed upon "those prodigies of myriad nakednesses." Likewise did he much delight in the performances of Schneider—that high priestess of the obscene, rich with the spoils of princes. I say emphatically that there were actions, gestures, bouffonneries performed amid peals of laughter and thunders of applause by this fat Faustina in the St. James's Theatre, London, which were only fit to have gladdened the revels of Sodom and Gomorrah. And this woman was, artistically at least, the prime favorite of the Prince of Wales; and when his brother, the Duke of Edinburgh, reached England for the first time after his escape from the Fenian bullet in Sydney, the par nobile fratrum celebrated the auspicious event by hastening to the theatre where Schneider kicked and wriggled and helped out the point of lascivious songs by a running accompaniment of obscene gestures.

So much at least has to be said against the Prince of Wales, and cannot be gainsaid. All that he could do by countenance and patronage to encourage a debauching and degrading style of theatric entertainment, he has done. He is said to be fond of the singing of the vulgar and low buffoons of the music-halls, and to have had such persons brought specially to his residence, Marlborough House, to sing for him. I have been assured of this often by persons who professed to know; but I do not know anything of it myself, nor is it indeed a matter of any importance. The other facts are known to everybody who reads the London papers. The manager or manageress of a theatre takes good care to announce in the journals when a visit from the Prince of Wales has taken place, and we all thus come to know how many times a week the little theatric temples of nakedness have been honored by his presence.

Am I attaching too much importance to such matters as this? I think not. The social influence and moral example of a royal personage in England are now almost the only agencies by which the royal personage can affect us for good or evil. I hold that no man thoughtful or prudent enough, no matter what his morals, to be fit to occupy the position assigned to the Prince of Wales, would be guilty of lending his public and constant patronage to such exhibitions and amusements as those which he especially patronizes. Moreover, the Prince has often shown a disregard, either cynical or stupid—probably the latter—for public opinion, a heedlessness of public scandal, in other matters as well. He has made companionship for himself among young noblemen conspicuous for their debauchery. At a time, not very long ago, when the Divorce Court was occupied with the hearing of a scandalous cause, in which a certain young duke figured most prominently and disgracefully, this young duke was daily and nightly to be seen the close companion of the Prince of Wales.

Let me touch upon another subject, of a somewhat delicate nature. I have said that there were times when our Prince was always wide awake at the opera house. There is a certain brilliant and capricious little singer whom all England and Germany much admire, and who in certain operatic parts has, I think, no rival. Now, public scandal said that the Prince of Wales greatly admired this lady, and paid her the most marked attentions. Public scandal, indeed, said a great deal more. I hasten to record my conviction that, so far as the fair artiste was concerned, the scandal was wholly unfounded, and that she is a woman of pure character and honor. But the Prince was credited with a special admiration for her; and I am sure the Prince's father under such circumstances would have taken good care to lend no foundation, afford no excuse, for scandal to rest upon. Now, I speak of what I have myself observed when I say that the Prince of Wales, whenever he had an opportunity, always demeaned himself as if he really desired to give the public good reason for believing the scandal, or as if he was too far gone in infatuation to be able to govern his actions. For he was always at the opera when this lady sang; and he always conducted himself as if he wished to blazon to the world his ostentatious and demonstrative admiration. When the prima donna went off the stage, the Prince disappeared from his box; when she came on the stage again, he returned to his seat; he lingered behind all his party at the end, that he might give the last note of applause to the disappearing singer; he made a more pertinacious show of his enthusiasm than even the military admirer of Miss Snevellicci was accustomed to do. Now, all this may have been only stolidity or silliness, and may not have denoted anything like cynicism or coarse disdain of public opinion; but whatever it indicated, it certainly did not, I think, testify to the existence of qualities likely to be found admirable or desirable in the heir to a throne.

Of the truth or falsehood of the private scandals in general circulation concerning the Prince of Wales I know nothing whatever. But everybody in England is aware that such stories are told, and can name and point out this or that titled lady as the heroine of each particular story. It need hardly be said that when a man acquires the sort of reputation which attaches to the Prince of Wales, nothing could be more unjust or unreasonable than to accept, without some very strong ground of belief, any story which couples his name with that of any woman belonging to the society in which he moves. Obviously, it would be enough, in the eyes of an English crowd, that the Prince should now pay any friendly attention to any handsome duchess or countess in order to convert her into an object of scandal. I am myself morally convinced that some of the titled ladies who are broadly and persistently set down by British gossip as mistresses of the Prince of Wales are as innocent of such a charge as if they had never been within a thousand miles of a court. But the Prince is a little unlucky wherever he goes, for scandal appears to pursue him as Horace's black care follows the horseman. When the Prince of Wales happens to be in Paris, he seems to be surrounded at once by the same atmosphere of suspicion and evil report. Some two years ago I chanced to be in Paris at the time the Prince was there, and I can answer for it that observers who had never heard or read of the common gossip of London formed the same impression of his general character that the public of London had already adopted. The Prince was then paying special attention to a brilliant and beautiful lady moving in the court circles of the French capital, a lady who had but very recently distinguished herself by appearing at one of the fancy balls of the Tuileries in the character of the Archangel Michael or Raphael—it does not much matter which—and attired in a costume which left the company no possibility of doubting the symmetry of her limbs and the general shapeliness of her person. Malicious satirists circulated thereupon an announcement that the lady was to appear at the next fancy ball as "La Source," the beautiful naked nymph so exquisitely painted by Ingres. This lady received the special attentions of the Prince of Wales. He followed her, people said, like her shadow; and a smart pun was soon in circulation, which I refrain from giving because it contrives ingeniously to blend with his name the name of the lady in question, and I am not writing a scandalous chronicle. This was the time when the Prince made his royal mother so very angry by attending the Chantilly races on a Sunday. When he came back to London he had to take part in some public ceremonial—I forget now what it was—at which the Queen had consented to be present. Her Majesty was present, and I have been assured by a friend who stood quite near that a sort of little scene was enacted which much embarrassed those who had to take part in the official pageantry of the occasion. Up came the Prince, who had travelled in hot haste from Paris, and with a somewhat abashed and sheepish air approached his royal mother. She looked at him angrily, and turned away. The Duke of Cambridge, her cousin, made an awkward effort to mend matters by bringing up the Prince again, and with the action of a friendly and deprecating intercessor presenting the delinquent. This time, I am assured, the Queen, with determined and angry gestures, and some words spoken in a low tone, repelled intercessor and offender at once; and the Prince of Wales retired before the threatened storm. The Duke of Edinburgh, who had been lingering a little in the background—he, too, had just come from Paris, and he had been to Chantilly—anxious to see what kind of reception would be accorded to his brother, thought, apparently, that he had seen enough to warrant him in keeping himself at a modest distance on that occasion, and not encountering the terrors of what Thackeray, in "The Rose and the Ring," describes as "the royal eye."

I have little doubt that Queen Victoria is a somewhat rigorous and exacting mother, and I should be far from accepting her frown as decisive with regard to the delinquencies of one of her sons. Cigar-smoking alone would probably be accounted by the Queen a sin hardly allowing of pardon. Her husband, Prince Albert, was a man so pure of life, so free from nearly all the positive errors of manhood, so remarkably endowed with at least all the negative virtues, that his companionship might easily have spoiled her for the toleration of natures less calm and orderly. I suspect that the Queen is one of that class of thoroughly good women who, from mere lack of wide sympathies and genial toleration, are not qualified to deal to the best advantage with children who show a little inclination for irregularity and self-indulgence. Nor do I believe that the Prince of Wales is the wicked and brutal profligate that common libel makes him out. The shocking story which one sees so often alluded to in the London correspondence of certain American papers, and which attributes the long illness of the Princess of Wales to the misconduct of her husband, I believe to be utterly unfounded and unjustifiable. One of the London medical journals, the "Lancet" I think it was, had the courage to refer directly to this monstrous statement, and to give it an emphatic and authoritative refutation. If the worst things said of the Prince of Wales with any appearance of foundation were true, it is certain that he would still not be any worse than many other European princes and sovereigns. I have never heard anything said of the Prince of Wales half so bad as the stories which are believed everywhere in Paris of the enormous profligacies of Prince Napoleon; and it would be hardly possible for charity itself to doubt that up to a very recent period the private life of the Emperor of the French himself was stained with frequent and reckless dissipation. Those who were in Vienna anywhere about the autumn of 1866, will remember the stories which were told about the fatal results of the exalted military command given by the imperial will to certain favored generals, and the kind of influence by which those generals had acquired imperial favor. Common report certainly describes the Empress of Austria as being no happier in her domestic relations than the Princess of Wales. Everybody knows what Victor Emanuel's private character is, and what sort of hopeful youth is his eldest son, Umberto. Therefore, the Prince of Wales could doubtless plead that he is no worse than his neighbors; and even in his own family he might point to other members no better than himself. The Duke of Cambridge, for instance, has often been accused of profligacy and profligate favoritism. I wish I could venture to repeat here, for the sake of the genuine wit and keen satire of it, a certain epigram in Latin, composed by an English military officer, to describe the influence which brought about the sudden and remarkable promotion of another officer who was not believed to be personally quite deserving of the rank conferred on him by the Duke of Cambridge, commander-in-chief of the British army. But the position of the Prince of Wales is very different from that of the Duke of Cambridge, and he has to face a public opinion quite unlike that which surrounds Prince Napoleon or the Emperor of the French. People in France are not inclined to make any very serious complaint about the amours of a prince, or even of an emperor. I do not venture to say that there is much more of actual immorality in Paris than in London; but, assuredly, a man may, without harm to his public and political influence, acknowledge an amount of immorality in Paris which would be utterly fatal to his credit and reputation in London. Moreover, some of the illustrious profligates I have mentioned are distinguished by other qualities as well as profligacy; but I cannot say that I have ever heard any positively good quality, either of heart or intellect, ascribed to the Prince of Wales.

Unless his face, his head, his manners in public, and the tastes he so conspicuously manifests wholly belie him, the heir to the British throne is a remarkably dull young man. He cannot even deliver with any decent imitation of intelligence the little speeches which Arthur Helps or somebody else usually gets up for him when the exigencies of the situation compel the Prince to make a speech in public. He is reputed to be parsimonious even in his pleasures, and has managed to get himself deeply into debt without being supposed to have wasted any of his substance in obedience to a generous impulse. The Prince inherited a splendid property. His prudent father had looked well after the revenues of the duchy of Cornwall, which is the appanage of the Prince of Wales (even in some very dingy parts of London you may if you hire a house find that you have the Prince of Wales for a landlord), and the property of the heir must have been raised to its very highest value. Yet it is notorious that a very few years after he had attained his majority, Albert Edward had contrived to get deeply immersed in debt. There was for some time a scheme in contemplation to apply to Parliament for an addition to the huge allowance made to the Prince of Wales; and the "Times" and other newspapers were always urging the fact that the Queen left the Prince to perform nearly all her social duties for her, as a reason why the nation ought to award him an augmented income. It puzzles people in London, who read the papers and who study, as most Britons do, the occupations and pastimes of royalty, to know where the lavish and regal hospitalities take place which the Prince of Wales is supposed to dispense on behalf of his mother. However, the project for appealing to the generosity of Parliament seems to have been put aside or to have fallen through—I have read somewhere that the Queen herself has agreed to increase her son's allowance out of her own ample and well-hoarded purse—and the English public are not likely to be treated to any Parliamentary debate on the subject just yet. But this much is certain, that the same almost universal rumor which attributes coarse and dissipated habits to the Prince of Wales attributes to him likewise a mean and stingy parsimony where aught save his own pleasure is concerned; and even there, if by any possibility the pleasure can be obtained without superfluous cost.

This then is the character which the son of the Queen of England bears, in the estimation of the vast majority of his mother's subjects. Almost any and every one you meet in London will tell you, as something beyond doubt, that the Prince of Wales is dull, stingy, coarse, and profligate. As for the anecdotes which are told of his habits and tastes by the artists and officials of the theatres which he frequents, I might fairly leave them out of the question, because most of them that I have heard seem to me obvious improbabilities and exaggerations. They have nevertheless a certain value in helping us to a sort of historical estimate of the Prince's character. Half the stories told of the humors and debaucheries of Sheridan and Fox are doubtless inventions or exaggerations; but we are quite safe in assuming that the persons of whom such stories abound were not frugal, temperate, and orderly men. If the Prince of Wales is not a young man of dissipated habits, then a phenomenon is exhibited in his case which is, I fancy, without any parallel in history—the phenomenon of a whole watchful nation, studying the character and habits of one whose position compels him to live as in a house of glass, and coming, after years of observation, to a conclusion at once unanimous and erroneous. But were it proved beyond the remotest possibility of doubt that the Prince is personally chaste as a Joseph, temperate as Father Mathew, tender to his wife as the elder Hamlet, attached to his mother as Hamlet the younger, it would still remain a fact indisputable to all of us in London, who have eyes to see and ears to hear, that the Prince is addicted to vulgar amusements; that he patronizes indecent exhibitions; that he is given to the companionship of profligate men, and lends his helping hand to the success and the popularity of immoral and lascivious women.

What is to be the effect upon England of the reign of the Prince of Wales? Will England and her statesmen endure the rule of a profligate sovereign? No country can have undergone in equal time a greater revolution in public taste and sentiment at least, if not in morals, than England has since the time of George the Fourth. No genius, no eloquence, no political wisdom or merits could now induce the English people to put up with the open and undisguised excesses of a Fox; nor could any English statesman of the rank of Fox be found now who would condescend to pander to the vices of a George the Fourth. Thirty years of decorum in the Court, the Parliament, and the press have created a public feeling in England which will not long bear to be too openly offended by any one. But, although I may seem at first to be enunciating a paradox, I must say that all this is rather in favor of the chances of the Prince of Wales than against them. It will take so small a sacrifice on his part to satisfy everybody, that only the very extravagance of folly could lead him long astray on any unsatisfactory course, when once he has become directly responsible to the nation. We are not exacting in England as regards the private conduct of our great people. We only ask them to be publicly decorous. Everywhere in English society there is a quite unconscious, naive sort of Pharisaism, the unavowed but actual principle of which is that it matters very little if a man does the wrong thing, provided he publicly acts and says the right thing. I am perfectly satisfied that the great bulk of respectable and Philistine society in England would regard Robert Dale Owen, with his pure life and his views on the question of divorce, as a far more objectionable person than the veriest profligate who did evil stealthily, and professed to maintain the theory of a rigid marriage bond. The Prince of Wales will therefore need very little actual improvement in his way of life, in order to be all that his future subjects will expect, or care to ask. No one wants the Prince to be a man of ability; no one wishes him to be a good speaker. If Albert Edward were to rise in the House of Lords some night, and deliver a powerful and eloquent speech, as Prince Napoleon has often done in the French Senate, the English public would be not only surprised but shocked. Such a feat performed by a Prince would seem almost as much out of place, as if he were to follow the example of Caligula or Nero and exhibit himself in the arena as a gladiator. Of course the idea of the Prince of Wales fulminating against the policy of the Crown and the Government, after the fashion of Prince Napoleon, would be simply intolerable to the British mind of to-day—a thing so outrageous as indeed to be practically inconceivable. The Prince of Wales's part during the coming years, whether as first subject or as ruler, is as easy as could well be assigned to man. It is the very reverse of Bottom's; it is to avoid all roaring. He must be decorous, and we will put up with any degree of dulness; he must be decent, and we will all agree to know nothing of any private compensations wherewith he may repay himself for public propriety. All the influences of English statesmanship, rank, religion, journalism, patriotism, Philistinism, and flunkeyism, will instinctively combine to screen the throne against scandal, if only the throne will consent to allow of the possibility of such a protection. I have hardly ever known an Englishman whose hostility to monarchical institutions went so far that he would not be ready to say, "We have got a monarchy; let us try to make the best we can of it." Therefore the Prince of Wales must be the very Marplot or L'Etourdi of princes, if he cannot contrive to make himself endurable to a people who will bear so much rather than be at the trouble of a change. Of course it is possible that his faults may become grosser and more unmanageable with years (indeed, he is quite old enough already to have sown his wild oats long since); and it would be a hard trial upon decorous English statesmen and the English public to endure an openly profligate King. Yet even that nuisance I think would be endured for one lifetime at all events, rather than encounter the danger and trouble of any organic change.

So long as the Prince of Wales keeps out of politics, he may hold his place well enough; the England of to-day could far better endure even a George the Fourth than a George the Third. I have little doubt that the Prince of Wales, when he comes to be King, will be discreet in this matter at least. He has never indeed shown any particular interest in political affairs, so far as I have heard. He seems to care little or nothing about the contests of parties. Some three or four years ago, at the time of the celebrated Adullamite secession from the Liberal party, there was some grumbling among Radicals because it was reported that the Prince of Wales had expressed a wish to make the acquaintance of Robert Lowe, the brilliant, eccentric chief of the secession, and had had Lowe brought to him and spent a long time talking with him; and it was urged that this was done by the Prince to mark his approval of the Adullamites and his dislike of radicalism. But just about the very same time the Prince took some trouble to make the acquaintance of John Bright, and paid what might have been considered very flattering attentions to the great popular tribune. The Prince has more than once visited the Pope, and he has likewise more than once visited Garibaldi. Indeed, he seems to have a harmless liking for knowing personally all people who are talked about; and I fancy he hunted up the Pope, and Garibaldi, and John Bright, and Robert Lowe, just as he sends for Mr. Toole the comic actor, or Blondin, or Chang the giant. Nothing can be safer and better for the Prince in the future than to keep to this wholesome indifference to politics. In England we could stand any length of the reign of King Log. I shall not venture to conjecture what might happen if the Prince of Wales were to develop a perverse inclination to "meddle and muddle" in politics, because I think such a thing highly improbable. My impression is, on the whole, that things will go on under the reign of the next sovereign in England very much as they have been going on under the present; that the Prince of Wales will be induced to pay a little more attention to decorum and public propriety than he has hitherto done; and that the people of England will laugh at him and cheer for him, talk scandal about him and sing God save him, and finally endure him, on somewhat the same principle as that which induces the New York public to endure overcrowded street-cars and miserable postal arrangements—just because it is less trouble to each individual to put up with his share of a defective institution, than to go out of his way for the purpose of endeavoring to organize any combination to get rid of it.