On the old Chevalier’s birthday, the 10th of June, Dr. Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London, escorted Hannah More to the House of Lords, to hear the king deliver the speech by which he prorogued Parliament. On that once famous day for defiantly wearing a white rose and risking mortal combat in consequence, the Countess of Albany ‘chose to go to see the King in the House of Lords, with the crown on his head, proroguing the Parliament.’ ‘What an odd rencontre!’ says Walpole, ‘was it philosophy or insensibility?’ and he adds his belief, without stating the grounds for it, ‘that her husband was in Westminster Hall at the Coronation.’ Hannah More was being ‘very well entertained’ with the speech; but the thing that was most amusing, as she prettily described it, ‘was to see, among the ladies, the Princess of Stolberg, Countess of Albany, wife of the Pretender, sitting just at the foot of that throne which she might once have expected to have mounted; and what diverted the party when I put them in mind of it, was that it happened to be the 10th of June, _the Pretender’s birthday_! I have the honour to be very much like her, and this opinion was confirmed yesterday when we met again.’ It has been seen what Walpole and others thought of the Jacobites’ queen when she came to London. The lady kept a diary during her sojourn here, from which may be collected her opinions of the English and England of her day. [Sidenote: _THE COUNTESS, ON ENGLISH SOCIETY._] The widow of Charles Edward found England generally, and London in particular, much duller than even she had expected. She saw crowds but no society. People lived nine months in the country, and during the three months in town they were never at home, but were running after one another. They who were not confined half or all the year with gout, went to bed at four, got up at midday, and began the morning at two in the afternoon. There was no sun, but much smoke, heavy meals, and hard drinking. The husbands were fond and ill-tempered; the wives good from a sense of risk rather than disinclination for their being otherwise, and they loved gaming and dissipation. There was a family life, but no intimate social life; no taste nor capacity for art. The most striking part of the judgment of the Countess of Albany refers to English laws and constitution. ‘The only good,’ she says in her Diary, ‘which England enjoys, and which is inappreciable, is political liberty.... If England had an oppressive government, this country together with its people would be the last in the universe: bad climate, bad soil, and consequently tasteless productions. It is only the excellence of its government that makes it habitable.’ This judgment of England by a Jacobite princess or queen, whose husband would have changed all but the climate, is at least interesting. In England the Duchess of Devonshire and many other ladies treated her as ‘queen.’ ‘The flattery’ (says the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ July, 1861, p. 170), ‘which the writers