In reference to his heroine, Mr. Yorke says that “the familiarity of her style brings us all the closer to her, and the more familiar it is the more intimate becomes our friendship for her. Sometimes it is the case that where the style is most imperfect, there most appear the individuality and originality of the Princess, and her portrait drawn by herself must be of more value and interest to us than any accuracy or polish of diction.” The Princess also loved her friends, and this led her to write to them _con amore_, so that, as we read, “a whiff of old times is breathed upon us.” She was in the best sense a woman of her own times, one who inherited her father’s good qualities; and during the ailments of youth she proved her good constitution by surviving the medical treatment of the day. A girl of fifteen in these days may still be liable to congestion of the lungs, but what would she now say to being bled five times in forty-eight hours, to having to take “emetics every other day,” and to having her “backbones rubbed with musk?” In other respects the Princess seems to have been subjected to very old-fashioned treatment. Even at the age of twenty-six she was not allowed to read a book which her mother had not previously examined. Nor does she appear to have possessed an income of her own until she was forty-two years old. The Princess was six years older when she married Frederick VI. of Hesse-Homburg. The attention which the Princess extended to certain of her chosen friends, appears to have been quite extraordinary. Thus, Lady Harcourt, wife of the second Earl, says: “Once, when I was ill and confined to the house for six weeks, I received from her in that time 143 letters.” The crosses of life, its joys and sorrows, with adventures which vividly show how different those times were from our own, all in turn come in for a share of attention. The journey between Windsor and Weymouth was then a familiar one, and it was possible even for Royalty to meet with rough adventures on the road. On October, 3, 1792, the Princess writes: “Anything so disgusting as the breakfast at Woodgate’s Inn, on the way from Weymouth, I thank God I never saw before and never wish to see again. Bad butter, tea, coffee, bread, etc.; nothing to eat but boiled eggs, which were so hard that I could not eat them. So I returned to the carriage just as I got out--starved.” Anxieties connected with public affairs and the wars gave far more serious trouble, however. The brothers of the Princess, the Duke of York, and the father of the present Duke of Cambridge, were with the army on the Continent in the summer of 1793, and when news came that the heroes were “within sixty yards of Valencienne,” their sister turned sick at thought of the peril; but the Queen, their mother, showed “such an uncommon share of fortitude,” that she would not even speak about it. Still more alarming was the King’s being attacked by the mob when on his way to open Parliament.