In 1872, the most eminent personage of this latest Jacobite time, disappeared from the scene. The tall, gaunt, slightly bent figure of the gentleman, who once believed himself to be plain John Allen, till his father imparted to him a story that he, the sire, was the legitimate son of Charles Edward, and that plain John Allen was John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart, was missed from the Reading Room of the British Museum. There he used to enter, cloaked and spurred like an old warrior, with a sort of haughty resignation. Yet there was an air about him which seemed as a command to all spectators to look at him well, and to acknowledge that the character he had inherited from his father the lieutenant, who fancied he was the rightful King of England, was patent in him, as clearly as if he had been born in the purple. Some few people, of those whose idiosyncracy it is to lend ready faith to the romantic impossible, believed in the genuineness of the character, and held the pretensions it interpreted to be as well-founded as those of either of ‘the Pretenders.’ This Chevalier Stuart, or Comte d’Albanie, mixed a flavour of the scholar with that of the warrior. He and his brother sat together apart from unprincely folk in the Reading Room. Books, papers, documents, and all the paraphernalia of study and research were scattered about them. ◆[Sidenote: _THE ELDER SON OF ‘RED EAGLE.’_]◆ Quietly unobtrusive, yet with a ‘keep your distance’ manner about them, they were to be seen poring over volumes and manuscripts as if in search of proofs of their vicinity to the throne, and found gratification in the non-discovery of anything to the contrary. Looking at the elder gentleman who was often alone, the spectator could not help wondering at the assiduous pertinacity of the Chevalier’s labour. Nothing seemed to weary him, not even the wearisome making of extracts, the result of which has not been revealed. Perhaps it was the vainly attempted refutation of the plain, logical, consequential, irrefutable statements made in Volume 81 of the ‘Quarterly,’ by Mr. Lockhart, who, courteously cruel, smashed to atoms the fanciful idea which had entered Lieutenant Allen’s brains, and from which idea was evolved the perplexing conclusion that he, the ex-lieutenant, was Tolair Deargh, the Red Eagle, and by divine grace, obstructed by human obstinacy, king of three realms! The elder son of the Red Eagle was as familiar a figure in the streets of London as he was in the Museum; and wayfarers who had no thought as to his individuality, must have felt that the cloaked and spurred personage was certainly a gentleman who wore his three score years and ten with a worthiness exacting respect. The same may be said of his sorrowing surviving brother, ‘Le Comte d’Albanie’ (Charles Edward), as his card proclaims him. In this ‘Chevalier,’ whose figure is well known to most Londoners, the chivalrous spirit survives. The last record of him in this character is in the year 1875, when