When we read in the fairy stories that the King and Queen, who lived once upon a time, build a castle of steel, defended by moats and sentinels innumerable, in which they place their darling only child, the Prince or Princess, whose birth has blessed them after so many years of marriage, and whose christening feast has been interrupted by the cantankerous humour of that notorious old fairy who always persists in coming, although she has not received any invitation to the baptismal ceremony: when Prince Prettyman is locked up in the steel tower, provided only with the most wholesome food, the most edifying educational works, and the most venerable old tutor to instruct and to bore him, we know, as a matter of course, that the steel bolts and brazen bars one day will be of no avail, the old tutor will go off in a doze, and the moats and drawbridges will either be passed by His Royal Highness’s implacable enemies, or crossed by the young scapegrace himself, who is determined to outwit his guardians, and see the wicked world. The old King and Queen always come in and find the chambers empty, the saucy heir-apparent flown, the porter and sentinels drunk, the ancient tutor asleep; they tear their venerable wigs in anguish, they kick the major-domo downstairs, they turn the duenna out of doors—the toothless old dragon! There is no resisting fate. The Princess will slip out of window by the rope-ladder; the Prince will be off to pursue his pleasures, and sow his wild oats at the appointed season. How many of our English princes have been coddled at home by their fond papas and mammas, walled up in inaccessible castles, with a tutor and a library, guarded by cordons of sentinels, sermoners, old aunts, old women from the world without, and have nevertheless escaped from all these guardians, and astonished the world by their extravagance and their frolics? What a wild rogue was that Prince Harry, son of the austere sovereign who robbed Richard the Second of his crown,—the youth who took purses on Gadshill, frequented Eastcheap taverns with Colonel Falstaff and worse company, and boxed Chief Justice Gascoigne’s ears! What must have been the venerable Queen Charlotte’s state of mind when she heard of the courses of _her_ beautiful young Prince; of his punting at gambling-tables; of his dealings with horse-jockeys; of his awful doings with Perdita? Besides instances taken from our Royal Family, could we not draw examples from our respected nobility? There was that young Lord Warwick, Mr. Addison’s stepson. We know that his mother was severe, and his stepfather a most eloquent moralist, yet the young gentleman’s career was shocking, positively shocking. He boxed the watch; he fuddled himself at taverns; he was no better than a Mohock. The chronicles of that day contain accounts of many a mad prank which he played, as we have legends of a still earlier date of the lawless freaks of the wild Prince and Poins. Our people has never looked very unkindly on these