a comfortable provision for the days of age, in
case they failed, or a well-timed addition to the
fruits of their labour.

The coming of age questions are high mysteries.
Do all men attain years of discretion at
the same moment in their lives—as the clock
strikes twelve on the night preceding their
twenty-second birthday—twenty-second because
they are 0 years old on their first—does nobody
ever between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five
grow less discreet every day? Diversity
of character, say the lawyers, can have
nothing to do with it. Twenty-one is the age at
which every man ought to be discreet. Prodigious
truth! Bilkins at twenty-one publishes
rhapsodies of verse; Dilkins, at twenty-one converts
all silver that he touches into pastry;
Filkins, at twenty-one, crams for examination,
and gulps information down in undigested lumps;
but they are all equally patterns of Blackstonian
discretion.

He is the thirteenth English Prince of Wales
who comes of age this year, on Sunday, the ninth
of November. Of his predecessors, only four
held the title when they came of age, so this
is only the fifth of such coming-of-ages known to
English history. Of the four who thus came of
age as Princes of Wales, three came to the throne.
Four of the princes married, and of these only
one made a Princess of Wales a queen. May
the omen be absent from this celebration; for
all England joins the present prince in wishing
that it may be forty years and more before he
can be king.

In the fourteenth century, Edward the Black
Prince, first Prince of Wales, died, aged forty-six,
in the lifetime of his father. In him, England
saw the first celebration of a marriage of a Prince
of Wales—the genuine love-match celebrated
five hundred and one years ago with the bright
hearty and merry countess, his cousin Joan, the
Fair Maid of Kent, daughter and heiress of the
Earl of Kent, whom Mortimer had put to death.

Edward the Third died so soon after his eldest
son, that Richard, his eleven-year-old grandson
and successor, never took his brother's title of
Prince of Wales. Henry the Fourth of Lancaster,
having seized the throne, conferred next on
his eldest son—Falstaff's sweet Hal—the rank of
Prince of Wales, the second of the name. Hal
became king before he was of age, and married
as a king, not while a prince. His son, Henry
the Sixth, was proclaimed king while yet in his
swaddling-clothes, only nine months old, and he
was never Prince of Wales. Wars of the roses
preceded the accession of Edward the Fourth,
who had not been a Prince of Wales. The
third of the Princes of Wales was Edward
the Fifth, who began to reign at the age of
thirteen, and in the days of whose princedom
there was for himself neither coming of age nor
marriage. Richard the Third, of course, never
was Prince of Wales, but the title was given by
him to his son Edward, who died in infancy.
That was the fourth prince; the fifth was
Arthur, son of King Henry the Seventh. This
Prince of Wales did not survive to years of discretion,
nor did he live to attain the throne, but
he was the second Prince of Wales who married.
At fifteen years of age, he became the husband
of the Spanish Infanta, Katherine of Aragon.
There was great festival in London. Five months
afterwards, the boy was dead. His brother
Henry, then aged twelve, succeeded him as
Prince of Wales; and it was arranged for him
that when he attained the age of fifteen, he
should succeed, by marriage, to his brother's
widow. He did not marry her until a few
weeks after attaining the throne, at the age
of eighteen: so there was neither coming of
age nor wedding when Henry the Eighth was
Prince of Wales, and he was the fifth who bore
the title.

Henry's son, Edward the Sixth, came as a boy to
the throne, and is said never to have been created
Prince of Wales. Then followed Mary, Elizabeth,
and James the First, whose son Henry
(the sixth Prince of Wales) died before coming
of age, and while his probable marriage was but
matter of discussion. His brother Charles was
the seventh of this broken line of princes. He
came of age while Prince of Wales, and signed
as prince the marriage contract with Henrietta
Maria, renewing his signature after he had become
king, at the age of twenty-five. He was Charles
the First before she actually came to him as
wife.

The next Prince of Wales was detained from
the throne by the Commonwealth; when he came
of age he had just been crowned by the Scots at
Scone, and was near the end of his vain struggle
against Cromwell. He became king at thirty, and
it was as king that he married Catharine of Portugal.

His brother, James the Second, who succeeded
him, of course had not been Prince of Wales, nor
was his infant son, nor was William of the Revolution,
nor was Queen Anne's one surviving son
William, named Duke of Gloucester: after whose
death the Act of Settlement was passed, which
in due time made of George the First an English
king.

Thus, after the time of the Commonwealth, we
have no formally created Prince of Wales until
the reign of George the First, when his son, who
became George the Second, received that rank,
being more than thirty years of age before he
held it, when he had been already married for
ten years. So in the days also of his princedom
there was neither coming of age nor
marriage.

The next prince, the tenth in the list, was
Frederick, the eldest son of George the Second.
Frederick first came to England after his
father's accession, and his own creation as Prince
of Wales, when he was already just of age. His
coming of age, therefore, was no matter of public
interest, but there was celebration in abundance
of his marriage, eight or nine years later, with
the Princess Augusta of Saxe Gotha. Frederick