"No, sir, with my fellow-students, those of my own years, amongst whom I had been placed. But I found that it was impossible. They, for the lesser offense, were actually 'sent down'; I, having finished my thesis and obtained my doctor's degree, was merely passed on at a slightly accelerated pace to receive fresh honors. That gave me a lesson which I have never forgotten; no honor that has come to me have I ever fully earned; and no disgrace that I have earned has ever been visited upon me for the public to know. There in a nutshell you have the moral training of the heir to a modern throne. What chance, then, have I to know anything about morality?" "My dear son," said the King, "don't say these dreadful things. Even if they are true, don't say them. They do no good." But though he deprecated having to meet such thoughts clothed in the flesh of speech, he was really very much interested to find that Max had them; he was seeing his son in a new light. And meanwhile the Prince went on-- IV "I often think, sir, of those two medieval institutions which we have now lost--I suppose irrevocably--the whipping boy and the court jester. What a pity that they cannot be revived! The whipping boy, a device to put princes on their honor to be neither negligent nor wanton in the fulfilment of their duties; and the jester to break us of our too self-conscious airs and exhibit to us our follies. See what we have done instead! When our growing sense of priggish decorum and our dishonest ceremoniousness of speech made the jester a figure no longer possible, we substituted for him the poet-laureate!--not to persuade us of our follies, but to chant our undeserved praises. And alas, how much more ridiculous, at certain times, he has made us appear--nay, be! With what lecherous sweetness or ponderous grief he has put us to bed with our wives or our ancestors, with what maudlin sentiment he has crooned over us in our cradles! And how poor a show we present when poetry thus tries to make our ordinary human doings appear so different from those of other men! England set us that bad example; and, as usual, we followed her. Only think how far more resplendent might have been her history had the Court of St. James's continued and developed the institution of the jester and let the laureateship go. If Pope could only have had the teasing of Queen Anne, and Swift the goading of the earlier Georges; if Johnson could have bumbled gruff wisdom into the ears of number three; and, following upon these, could Sheridan, and Hook, and Carlyle, and Sidney Smith (I pick up names almost at random) have had a really assured position and full plenary indulgence as commentators on the Court and aristocracy of the Regency, and of the early Victorian period which culminated in that middleman's millennium, the Great Exhibition, with its Crystal Palace so shoddily furnished to celebrate the expurgation of art from industry. If only that could have been allowed,