It may be asked, why should this be said now, and why should I say it? To which I would reply, that having had the honour of a personal acquaintance with his Majesty, when Prince of Wales (through the late Recorder of London, Sir Charles Hall), and having been treated by him with great courtesy and attention, I was and am still sufficiently impressed by his kindness to be conscious of gratitude. And that out of this, my sense of gratitude, I have, whenever I have heard people discussing the Prince, now the King, taken care to exercise those particular privileges belonging to the profession of Literature, which are, to hear, to observe, and to chronicle such things as may be useful to remember in the history of the time. And so it has chanced that I, being deemed altogether unimportant by that particular section of Society which judges Literature merely as a sort of bill-posting or press-reporting, which giggles foolishly at the names of Homer and Shakespeare, and can never be brought to realize that all day and every day, millions of pens are constantly at work, writing down such impressions of the hour as will outlast thrones, and be read by future generations,--even I, one of the least of these wielders of pens, have had the opportunity of seeing and noting much which it might be well and honest to set down. It can do no harm, and it may do good, to say that I have seen women of birth and position so lost to every sense of the true dignity of womanhood as to descend to the meanest tricks and subterfuges in the endeavour to secure the notice of, or an introduction to, the Prince of Wales, and that then, when such notice or introduction has been obtained, I have heard them vilify him behind his back with the fluency and choice diction common to the ladies of Billingsgate. It can do no harm, and it may do good, to say that a certain prominent American politician, professing to be a friend of the Prince’s and having been entertained at dinner by His Royal Highness on a certain evening in Homburg, met the present writer hard by Ritter’s Park Hotel next morning, and did then and there point to the Royal Standard flying above the door, with the remark, “See that old rag! It ought to be rolled up and put away with all the racks, thumbscrews, and other useless rubbish of Royalty!”