would not be a princess, to live always on cakes,
and fruits, and bonbons; to have as much money
and as many lovers as she can possibly manage,
and more than she wants; to be the darling of
the whole world about her; and finally to be
married to a young king, as beautiful as Love,
and as amiable as he is beautiful? ''As happy
as a princess!" What female imagination can
go beyond that?

And yet there was once a princess living here
on this island, and during the lives of some of
us, with whose fate not the meanest of the
sisterhood might have wished lo exchange her
own: a princess who, when a marriageable young
woman, was treated with the disrespect and
tyranny of a naughty child; who was kept close
prisoner in an ugly and unhealthy place, and
denied even the privilege of change of air for
her health; who was tyrannised over by her
father, separated from her mother—which last
was no great loss, though—neglected and ill-
treated by her grandmother, surrounded by spies
and gaolers; at one time almost forced into a
marriage with a man she did not and could not
love; and who passed her days in alternate
terror and despair, not knowing what new
humiliation her tormentors might not have
imagined against her since the last had had
time to cool. This was a princess who would
have sat on the throne of England had her life
been spared, and who, at the very moment of
her worst humiliations, had apparently a better
chance, than the worn-out debauchee, her
father, of wearing the crown which would have
made her sovereign of the most powerful kingdom
in the world. Poor Princess Charlotte!

The daughter of a reckless woman and an
abandoned unprincipled man, the marvel was
that she had any virtues of her own, and had not
rather inherited all the vices on both sides with
which nature had so liberally endowed her
parents. As it was, she was even beyond the
average in good feeling and ability; and,
notwithstanding a hasty temper and more than the
ordinary amount of royal imperiousness, she
gave fair promise of a capable and noble womanhood,
and of sufficient good sense and discretion
to have made her reign as rational and judicious
as the present. She was handsome in person,
dignified and yet kindly in manner, with the
good personal habits traditional to most of her
race, and of a very warm and loving nature.
Moreover, she was the passive symbol and rallying
word of the liberal party, and without having
ever done anything marked in life, good or
bad, was the idol and the hope of the whole
nation. She was, in fact, all the more beloved,
and showed to all the more advantage, because
of her freshness and untainted girlhood, contrasted
as she was with the regent, whose very
name was synonymous with vice, and contrasted
with the princess whose grave errors her best
friends could only excuse, not deny. She was
the only one of the sovereigns in present being,
or in future time, for whom the nation could feel
pride or love. The familiar, domestic, "family
man," was a moping idiot; the mean, close-fisted,
German queen, who darned her stockings
and slapped her daughters at Windsor, had never
been popular; of the Regent all good men were
ashamed; for the Regent's wife all good women
blushed and sorrowed. The young Princess
Charlotte alone was left as the hope and darling
of the people; whose virtues were not mere
dust and ashes, and in whose future there
might be expectation and delight.

But what a life of petty trials and home
humiliations she went through! As happy as a
princess? The heiress of three kingdoms, a
principality, and a crowd of conquests and
colonies, was not half so happy as red-cheeked
Betty, who trundled her mop in the kitchen,
and was of too little importance to be made
miserable by tyranny and intrigues. A more
melancholy picture of the inner lile of royalty
cannot well be imagined than that which
Miss Cornelia Knight gives us in her Autobiography;
nor can a much more sorrowful lesson
on the debasing influence of a court on the souls
of courtiers be met with anywhere. I doubt,
indeed, if courtiers have any souls, and rather
incline to the belief that, they have burnt them
all away in incense to their earthly gods; that
they have kowtowed so long and so lowlily they
are no longer able to stand erect and look before
them like men. What can we say of a poor
weak slavish creature who goes into hysterics if
majesty looks coldly on her; who manoeuvres,
and studies, and plans, and plots, for her fitting
presentation at the next drawing-room, as if a
queen's feathers were literally angel's wings,
and a queen's familiar word the passport to
heaven itself? I wonder if any poor sinning
soul kneels at Saint Peter's feet before the gate
with half the unction and self-abasement of a
thorough-going courtier grovelling before
majesty in the throne-room!

Well! Weak, intelligent, intensely proper,
humble, cautious, kowtowing Miss Cornelia
Knight, was put into the uncomfortable little
temple where the Princess Charlotte was the
presiding deity, and she burnt her incense to
her heart's content, and exhaled all her independence,
and self-respect, and womanhood, in
magnificent clouds of perfumed smoke, according
to the fashion of time and place. In the
mean time the princess did not care a straw for
all the incense in the world. What she wanted,
with her solid character and material matter-of-
fact imperiousness, was more personal liberty;
more personal consideration, a finer house, and
a more appropriate establishment; her purse in
her own hands, and not held by both ends by
gouvernante or lady; she wanted a husband of
her own choice; a private little court of her own
ruling; she wanted to be freed from the unkindness
of her father, and the prim old maidenisms
of her aunts; from her coarse old grandmother's
insolence and dislike; from her state of pupilage
and dependence generally; and she kicked over
Miss Cornelia Knight's burning censer without
the least remorse, as she paced backwards and
forwards through the dark uncomfortable little
temple, where she was nothing better than a