On the morning of which I am writing, the newspaper world was sadly in want of a sensation. A royal personage had, it is true, put off the crown corruptible for one which would press less heavily on his brow; but he had, as a pressman phrased it, “given away the entire situation” by allowing himself for a fortnight to be announced as “dying.” This, Fleet Street resented as unartistic, and partaking of the nature of an anti-climax. Better things, it considered, might have been expected from so eminent an individual; and as such a way of making an end was not to be encouraged, the Press had, as a warning to other royal personages, passed by the event as comparatively unimportant. It was true, too, that the Heir Apparent had on the previous evening entered a carriage on the Underground Railway as it was on the point of starting, and that the placards of the “special” editions had in consequence announced an “Alarming Accident to the Prince of Wales,” which, when H. R. H. had contemptuously remarked that there never had been an approach to danger, was changed in the “extra specials” to “The Prince describes his Narrow Escape.” The incident had, however, been severely commented on as “sensation-mongering” by the morning papers (badly in want of a sensation themselves), and was now practically closed, so that the alliterative artist of the “Morning Advertiser’s” placards had nothing better upon which to exercise his ingenuity than a “Conflict among County Councillors,” and the “Daily Chronicle’s” most exciting contents were a poem by Mr. Richard le Gallienne and a letter from Mr. Bernard Shaw. Nor was anything doing in the aristocratic world. Not a single duke, marquis, earl, viscount, or baron was appearing as respondent or co-respondent in a divorce case, or as actor in any turf or society scandal, and there was a widespread feeling that the aristocracy, as a whole, was not doing its duty to the country.