lawful sovereign of the realm. And the documents having reference to George III.'s first marriage were inseparably attached to the documents by which the legitimacy of Mrs. Serres was supposed to be established, with the view, no doubt, of impressing on the king's mind the fact that she could not put forward her claims, as she intended to do, without at the same time making public the fact that the marriage between George III. and Queen Charlotte was invalid. Could any one believe in the authenticity of certificates like these; or was it possible to imagine that, even if Hannah Lightfoot had existed, and asserted her claim, great officers of state like Chatham and Dunning should have recognised her as "Hannah Regina," as they were said to have done? In another document the Duke of Kent gave the guardianship of his daughter to the Princess Olive. Remembering the way in which that lady had been brought up, and the society in which she had moved, could the Duke of Kent ever have dreamed of superseding his own wife, the mother of the infant princess, and passing by all the other distinguished members of his family, and conferring on Mrs. Serres, the landscape painter, the sole guardianship of the future Queen of England? They must also bear in mind the way in which the claim had been brought forward. The irresistible inference from the different tales told was, that the documents were from time to time prepared to meet the form which her claims from time to time assumed. A great deal had been said about different members of the royal family having countenanced and supported this lady. He could quite understand, if an appeal was made on her behalf as an illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Cumberland, that a generous-minded prince might say, "As you have our blood flowing in your veins, you shall not be left in want;" and, very likely, papers might have been shown to some members of the royal family in support of that claim which they believed to be genuine. It was just as easy to fabricate papers showing her illegitimacy as to fabricate those produced; and probably such papers would not be very rigorously scrutinized. But it was not possible to believe that the documents now produced (including the Hannah Lightfoot certificates) had been shown to members of the royal family, and pronounced by them to be genuine. He could not understand why the secret was to be kept after the Duke of Cumberland's death, when there was no longer any danger that he would incur the risk of punishment for bigamy; and why the death of George III. should be fixed upon as the time for disclosing it. The death of George III. was the very time when it would become important to keep the secret, for if it had been then disclosed, it would have shown that neither George IV. nor the Duke of Kent were entitled to succeed to the throne. Why then should the Duke of Kent stipulate for the keeping of the secret until George III.