‘To amuse herself is as necessary to her Royal Highness as meat and drink, and she made Mr. Craven and Sir W. Gell and myself promise to go with her to the masquerade. She is to go out at her back door, on the Uxbridge (Bayswater) road, of which “no person _under Heaven_” (her curious phraseology) has a key but her royal self, and we are to be in readiness to escort her Royal Highness in a hackney-coach to the Albany, where we are to dress. What a mad scheme at such a moment, and without any strong motive either to run the risk! I looked grave when she proposed this amusement; but I knew I had only to obey. I thought of it all night with fear and trembling.’ In the supplementary matter to the ‘Diary’ we have the following detail as the ‘curious story respecting this masquerade’:--‘The Princess,’ says the editor, apparently, ‘it was related to me by undoubted authority, would go to the masquerade, and, with a kind of girlish folly, she enjoyed the idea of making a grand mystery about it, which was quite unnecessary. The Duchess of York frequently went to similar amusements _incognita_, attended only by a friend or two, and nobody found fault with her Royal Highness. The Princess might have done the same; but no!--the fun, in her estimation, consisted in doing the thing in the most ridiculous way possible. So she made two of the ladies privy to her schemes; and the programme of the revel was that her Royal Highness should go down her back staircase with one of her ladies, while the cavaliers waited at a private door which led into the street, and then the _partie quarée_ was to proceed on foot to the Albany, where more ladies met her Royal Highness, and where the change of dress was to be made. All of this actually took place; and Lady ---- told me she never was so frightened in her life as when she found herself at the bottom of Oxford Street, at twelve at night, on her cavalier’s arm, and seeing her Royal Highness rolling on before her. It was a sensation, she told me, betwixt laughing and crying, that she should never forget. The idea that the Princess might be recognised, and of course mobbed, and then the subsequent consequences, which would have been so fatal to her Royal Highness, were all so distressing that the party of pleasure was one of real pain to her. This mad prank, Lady ---- told me, passed off without discovery, and certainly without any impropriety whatever, except that which existed in the folly of the thing itself. It was similar imprudences to this which were so fatal to the Princess’s reputation.’ And no wonder, if indeed these stories, as alleged, are true in their details, or are founded on truth.