When London, about three months after the breakfast at Mr. Rogers’, was threatened, on April 10, 1848, by an insurrectionary mob of Chartists, under the guidance of a half-crazy Irishman, named Feargus O’Connor, who afterwards died in a lunatic asylum, the Prince volunteered to act as a special constable, for the preservation of the peace, in common with many thousands of respectable professional men, merchants, and tradesmen. I met him in Trafalgar Square, armed with the truncheon of a policeman. On this occasion, the Duke of Wellington, then commander-in-chief of the British army, had taken the precaution to station the military in sufficient numbers at all the chief strategical points of the metropolis ready, though concealed from the notice of the multitude, to act on an emergency. Happily their services were not required. The sovereign was popular; the upper and middle classes were unanimous; a large section of the laboring classes had no sympathy with Chartism, and the display of the civic force, with bludgeons and staves only, without firearms of any kind, was quite sufficient to overawe the rioters. I stopped for a minute to exchange greetings with the Prince, and said I did not think from all that I had heard that the Chartists would resort to violence, and that their march through the streets would be orderly. The Prince was of the same opinion, and passed upon his beat among other police special constables in front of the National Gallery. As Lord William Lennox was of the breakfast party, I took the opportunity to ask him a question with regard to a disputed point. I had lately visited Brussels, the city in which I had passed my school-boy days, and which was consequently endeared to my mind by many youthful associations. The mother of Lord William, the beautiful Duchess of Richmond, had given a great ball on the night preceding the battle of Waterloo, in June, 1815, at which Lord William, then in his sixteenth year, was present. Every lover of poetry will remember the splendid description of this ball and of the subsequent battle which occurs in the third canto of Byron’s “Childe Harold.” The passage is unsurpassed in any language for the vigor, the picturesqueness, and the magnificence of its thought and diction, and in its relation to one of the most stupendous events in modern history. There was a sound of revelry by night, And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men; A thousand hearts beat happily; and when Music arose with its voluptuous swell, Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spake again, And all went merry as a marriage bell; But hush! hark: a deep sound strikes like a rising knell.