The above lady was the _ci-devant_ Miss Dormer. She appeared in London soon after Edward Wortley Montagu’s death; and in her family papers it is stated that she received one hundred pounds annually from Coutts’s out of her alleged husband’s estate. For a long period she resided at Nancy, and she may yet live in the recollection of not very old persons, English and others, who dwelt in that pleasant city in their youth, for the last of the wives of Wortley Montagu survived till January 1821. She lived and died as Countess of Montagu, and her death finally closed a romance of real life, the unfortunate hero of which would probably have won honourable fame if he had been blessed with a mother of a different quality. _ROYAL AND IMPERIAL JOKERS._ In that marvellous work of history, the ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ Gibbon somewhere remarks, in reference to sovereign ladies in love, that they are by their social position, or rather by their position above society, placed at a manifest disadvantage, inasmuch as the first advances must come from themselves. If this was the case in the olden time, it is not exactly so now--though, of course, the outer world knows little about the matter. Many princesses have not been at all troubled at the idea of having to speak, or look, first; and the great Russian Czarina had as little embarrassment in choosing her lovers as she had in murdering that holy and august madman, her husband. The well-favoured individuals on whom high and mighty princesses have been ready to smile had a delicate task to perform. They had to look more than twice before they leaped, and were compelled to feel their way very cautiously lest a false step or a too boldly ventured word should cost them their head. But after all this perilous condition of aspiring lovers was as nothing compared with the dangers of too wittily endowed courtiers who should indulge in jesting with a king, especially of the olden type and of mediæval and morose temper. When the courtiers of Amarose, King of Little Britain, gently awoke him with the glee-- ‘Awake, awake your royal nob, The kettle boils upon the hob’-- his surly and too suddenly aroused majesty descended to his tea, toast, and eggs, entered the breakfast-room with the gracious greeting, ‘My lords and gentlemen, get out!’ King Arthur, in ‘Tom Thumb,’ returns homage in much the same civil humour. These, however, are but stage kings--kings of shreds and patches. The flesh-and-blood, genuine, despotic monarch was a far more dreadful animal.