It certainly was not a period when Queens could expect to be cordial with people who insulted them, and whose speeches in public were exercising a very unwholesome influence on the more ignorant of the lower orders. At the above very Ascot races the King was grievously assaulted, in the Queen’s presence, by a ruffian in the crowd. Their Majesties had just taken their seats in the grand stand, and the King had then risen to salute the people in view, when the ruffian in question flung a stone at him, which struck the King on the forehead, but did not inflict any serious mischief. The assailant was let cheaply off; but Queen Adelaide was much distressed by his act, and the impression it made upon her was only increased, a week later, when she appeared with the King at the review in Hyde Park. There she was treated with such incivility and rudeness that at the fête at the Duke of Wellington’s, in the evening, where they held a little court, the Queen wore a spiritless and sorrowing aspect, while King William, his buoyant spirits all quenched, looked aged and infirm, weary of his vocation and vexations. The season, certainly, was not one for monarchs to be abroad in with joyous exterior. In the summer of this year there passed through London a princess whose story bore with it a great moral to the wearers of crowns--the Duchess of Angoulême, the daughter of Louis XVI. She had experienced the widest extremes of fortune, but had been longest and most intimately acquainted with misfortune. She was again a fugitive and an exile--one never destined to behold her country again. The Queen visited her at her modest apartments in Charles Street, Grosvenor Square, and she took leave of that illustrious victim of many revolutions with evil forebodings of the issue of the spirit of the then present time. Her Majesty did not, indeed, lack a certain spirit of her own wherewith to meet the other and revolutionary spirit. Thus, when her friend and faithful servant, Lord Howe, was compelled to give up his office of chamberlain to the Queen, his mistress would never accept the nomination of any other person to the same post. Lord Howe remained in attendance upon his mistress unofficially; but he positively refused to be reinstated by Lord Grey, to whom his reply was, ‘That he had been wantonly dismissed by him, and would receive no favour at his hands.’ The act of Lord Grey was, probably, far more keenly felt at court than that of the two new radical members (Messrs. Wigney and Faithful) returned for the royal borough of Brighton, and who, ‘under the very nose of the court,’ as it was said, ‘talked openly of reducing the allowance made to the King and Queen.’ This was a foolish speech; but there was an even more indiscreet tongue within the Pavilion than those of the new radical senators without. In 1833, the King himself declared in favour of a republican form of government! What must the feelings of Queen Adelaide have been--she