the loves played about her lips. When she smiled, emanations of benevolence seemed to shoot from every glance; and every glance interested the beholder, and made him feel that he was within an attractive influence of no ordinary kind. When her Royal Highness pleased to augment that influence, she could throw an archness into her look, and a witchery into her manner, that raised her to a sort of celestial preeminence in the power of communicating delight. Her step was quick and light; and she seemed as if she could bound upon the air. From the time of which I am speaking, with the exception. of two transient views of her person in the year 1814, I had not seen her Majesty till her late return from the continent. After the lapse of twenty-four years, and those years chequered with strange vicissitudes, and oppressed by heavy calamities, it cannot be supposed that time had left no traces of his silent ravage in her lovely form. But those traces are much fewer than might have been expected. The lines of age are hardly visible upon her brow. Her eyes lack none of the lustre of a more youthful period. The loves have not forsaken her lips; and cold, and sluggish, and insensate must that person be who is not fascinated by the witchery of her Majesty's smile.

He must be a dull or an unobserving physiognomist, who does not read in the countenance of the Queen a commanding decision of character, with no small portion of that intrinsic sagacity by which her Majesty seems at once to penetrate into the recesses of the mind, or to find her way through the labyrinths of the heart. Time has served to evolve more of the original energy of her Majesty's character; and, in her present appearance, I never remember to have beheld any female that seemed so well calculated to make royalty respectable; or who in her air, her manner, or her look, more completely exhibited what the imagination may conceive to belong to the identity of a Queen. If Virgil said of Juno, Incessu patuit dea, "the

goddess was revealed in her walk," I might say

the same of her Majesty. Her port is the port of the Queen; her step is the step of Majesty. Such was, such is that Royal Lady, whose complicated wrongs and accumulated persecutions constitute, at this moment, the interest of every circle, and the theme of every tongue.

I remember that, in the year 1795, the determination of the then Prince of Wales to enter the Elysium of married life, was said to have been occasioned by a desire to increase his income and pay his debts. Those persons who know the magnanimous disinterestedness of his present Majesty, and who are well acquainted with the economy which he has so long practised for the benefit of the present age and for the wonder of posterity, will by no means admit that such motives could have operated as a stimulus to matrimony in his royal breast. All, therefore, that we can positively assert is, the plain unadorned matter of fact, that his then Royal Highness's income was increased, and that his debts were either paid or put in a train of payment. This must have been owing to the spontaneous generosity of the Parliament, which is never slow in discerning the virtues of princes, sluggish in rewarding their merits, or fastidiously reluctant in pouring the public money into the lap of kings.

The debts of his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales in 1795, amounted to the small sum of £639,890 4s. 4d. In that year his late Majesty sent a message to the Parliament, in which he requested that the Prince and his "august spouse" might be provided with a suitable establishment. The income of the Prince was accordingly raised from £60,000 a year to £125,000, and a fifth part of this sum was set apart for the liquidation of his debts. The bounty of the Parlia ment, at the same time, allowed £27,000 for the immediate expenditure which the marriage might render requisite, while

£28,000 were voted for the purchase of jewels and plate*. Another sum was voted for the completion of Carlton House. These nuptials, which promised so little bliss to either party, and which have been productive of so much misery to her Majesty, were celebrated on the eighth day of April, in the abovementioned year 1795. The late beloved Princess Charlotte, whose premature death was not the subject of hypocritical mourning, but of unfeigned woe, was born on the 7th of Ja nuary, 1796. In three months and twenty-four days after this event, and at the end of one year and eighteen days after his marriage, the affectionate husband sent the following letter to his faithful wife:

"MADAM,

"Windsor Castle, April 30, 1796.

"As Lord Cholmondeley informs me that you wish I would define, in writing, the terms upon which we are to live, I shall endeavour to explain myself upon that head, with as much clearness, and with as much propriety, as the nature of the subject will admit. Our inclinations are not in our power, nor should either of us be held answerable to the other, because nature has not made us suitable to each other. Tran

* Notwithstanding this vote for jewels and plate, which was designed for the illustrious bride as well as the bridegroom, the reader will endeavour to forget the late polite refusal of plate to the Queen for her domestic exigencies.

+ The substance of this letter had been previously conveyed in a message through Lord Cholmondeley to her Royal Highness. But it was thought, by her Royal Highness, to be infinitely too important to rest merely upon a verbal communication, and therefore she desired that his Royal Highness's pleasure upon it should be communicated to her in writing.

quil and comfortable society is, however, in our power: let our intercourse, therefore, be restricted to that, and I will distinctly subscribe to the condition* which you required, through Lady Cholmondeley, that even in the event of any accident happening to my daughter, which I trust Providence in its mercy will avert, I shall not infringe the terms of the restriction by proposing, at any period, a connexion of a more particular nature, I shall now finally close this disagreeable correspondence, trusting that, as we have completely explained ourselves to each other, the rest of our lives will be passed in uninterrupted tranquillity.

"I am, Madam,

"With great truth, very sincerely yours,

(Signed)

66

GEORGE, P."

Who is there, with one particle of refinement in his frame, that does not feel the delicate phraseology of this letter? Who does not admire the fine tint of taste and of decency that is thrown over every word of the composition? Who, after perusing this precious document of conjugal affection, will say that princes are deficient in sensibility? Who can now be at all surprised that the writer of such an unparalleled effusion of virtue and decorum, of tenderness and affection, should complain of the levities or attempt to visit with dire

* Upon the receipt of the message alluded to, in the foregoing note, her Royal Highness, though she had nothing to do but to submit to the arrangement which his Royal Highness might determine upon, desired it might be understood, that she should insist that any such arrangement, if once made, should be considered as final. And that his Royal Highness should not retain the right, from time to time, at his pleasure, or under any circumstances, to alter it.

vengeance the imaginary licentiousness of his wife! Such a letter evidently gives the writer a most irresistible pretext for demanding that the affections of his consort should be for ever his, with individual and exclusive appropriation. Such a letter is too strict in its precepts, and too moral in its spirit, to admit one point of variation in the compass of conjugal love. To such a husband, to one so charily jealous of his wife's honour and so feelingly anxious for his own, who is there that will refuse to pay the tribute of respect? If, in common life, any woman had received such an unlimited furlough from the restraints of matrimony, such a permission to indulge her particular inclinations-who would have thought that the husband had any reason to complain of the infidelity of his spouse? What court would have directed any compensation for an imaginary injury, or what jury would have awarded any damages with such a document of conjugal licentiousness staring them in the face?

Let us now contemplate the answer which the insulted Princess returned to this notable epistle.

"L'aveu de votre conversation avec Lord Cholmondeley, ne m'étonne, ni ne m'offense. C'étoit me confirmer ce que vous m'avez tacitement insinué depuis une année. Mais il y auroit après cela, un manque de delicatesse ou, pour mieux dire, une bassesse indigne de me plaindre des conditions, que vous vous imposez a vous-même.

"Je ne vous aurois point fait de reponse, si votre lettre n'étoit conçue de maniere à faire douter, si cet arrangement vient de vous, ou de moi; et vous sçavez que vous m'annoncez l'honneur. La lettre que vous m'annoncez comme la derniere, m'oblige de communiquer au Roy, comme à mon Souverain, et à mon Pere, votre aveu et ma reponse. Vous trouverez çi incluse la copie de celle que j'ecris au Roy. Je vous en previens pour ne pas m'attirer de votre part la moindre reproche de duplicité. Comme je n'ai, dans ce moment,