‘The Duke of Clarence is going to be married, after all,’ was a common phrase launched by the newspapers, and taken up by the people, in 1818. If the phrase had but one meaning, it had a double application. In the former sense it had reference to the disinclination of Parliament to increase his income, without which he had expressed his determination not to marry. It was further applied, however, to the old course of his old loves. There were the years spent with Dora Bland, then ‘Mrs. Jordan,’ the actress--years of an intercourse which had much of the quiet, happy character of a modest English home--the breaking-up of which brought such great grief to the mother in that home that even every service subsequently rendered to her seemed to partake of the quality of offence. It has been registered as such by those who heard more of the wailing of the Ariadne than they knew of the groundlessness of it, when vented in reproaches for leaving her unprovided for as well as deserted. Then the public remembered how this light-of-heart Duke had been a suitor to other ladies. He was the rival of Wellesley Pole for the favour and the fortune of the great heiress, Miss Tilney Long. That ill-fated lady conferred on this wooer of humbler degree the office of slaying her happiness, sapping her life, and ruining her estate. The other lady, who declined the Duke’s offer of his hand or petition for her own, was Miss Sophia Wykeham, of Thame Park, daughter and _sole heiress_ of an Oxfordshire ’squire. Each lady had merits of her own, and other attractions besides those which lay in the _beaux yeux de sa cassette_; but perhaps each remembered the clauses of the Royal Marriage Act; however this may have been, Miss Tilney chose between her two suitors, while Miss Wykeham, after turning from the prayer of the Duke, never stooped to listen to a lowlier wooer. These were the ‘antecedents’ of the lover who, in mature age, took rather than asked for the hand of Adelaide of Saxe-Meinengen. Of all the actions of his life it was the one which brought him the most happiness; and with that true woman he had better fortune than is altogether merited by a man who, after a long bachelorship of no great repute, settles down in middle-life to respectability and content, under the influences of a virtuous woman, gifted with an excellent degree of common-sense.