This event was followed by an unusual amount of execrable elegiac verse, which was powerless, however, to throw ridicule on what it affected to solemnize. It was painful to read an inconceivable amount of this trash, which, intended to be serious, was often irresistibly comic. Out of the reams written in professed honour of a most exemplary Queen there was not an appropriate line worth citing. One sample of the solemnly absurd Pegasuses set restive on this occasion will assuredly satisfy curiosity. The writer affects to see at the royal funeral the ghosts of departed great ones, who assemble to do visionary homage to their new sister in death. Among them is the incautious Bishop who died from the effects of a cold caught at the funeral of the Duke of York:-- Lo! see the shade of a prelate pass by Who came to a night-burial to die; Standing too long expos’d to the chill air, Death aim’d his dart, and struck the mitre there. Poor Queen Adelaide! A wish could save her from some of the empty pomps and vanities that linger about the open grave, but nothing could save her from the villainous poetasters. All the rhymers who rung metrical knells at her death deserved the fate, and for like reasons, invoked in Julius Cæsar on the so-called poet who made ‘bad verses.’ The preachers, if honest chronicling is to be observed, did not on this occasion very much excel the poets. Very ‘tolerable’ indeed, and not at all to be endured, were most of the funeral sermons which have come under my notice. One clergyman, who had been the Queen’s chaplain too, and who had composed a funeral sermon on William IV. reproduced not merely the substance, but in many parts, identical passages from the discourse on the dead King, and made them do duty in illustrating the demise of that sovereign’s royal widow. Others were illogical, or were painfully simple or amusingly trite. In one I find an intimation that, ‘after deducting the more needful expenses of her household, she gave away _all_ she had, and died _poor_;’ which seems an inevitable consequence of such liberality. None of these who took a dead Queen for the subject of a lesson on vanity, or for an example to be followed, wore the mantle of a Bossuet--grand and instructive when consigning La Vallière to the cloister, or Henrietta of Orleans to a tomb. They might at least have found something suggestive in the sermon on the latter occasion, by the ‘Eagle of Meaux,’ where he exclaims, after apt reflection on birth, rank, and their responsibilities: ‘No! after what we have just seen, we must feel that health exists only in name, life is a dream, glory a deception, favours and pleasures dangerous amusements, everything about us vanity. She was as gentle towards death as she had been to all the world.... She will sleep with the great ones of the earth, with princes and kings, whose power is at an end, amongst whom there is hardly room to be found, so closely do they lie