hardly necessary that her Majesty should
have been obliged to express a wish (as she
is understood, however, to have expressed a
wish) that no public receptions of the Prince
should take place when the Euryalus
happened to touch at any particular port. Every
circumstance connected with the manner in
which the Queen has sent her son to sea,
must surely speak for itself, to the same plain
and direct purpose, in the case of any official
personage, in any part of the world, who
possesses one atom of tact or one grain of
common sense? Here is the man-of-war,
Euryalus; and one of the midshipmen on
board bears the Christian name of Alfred.
Surely, the clumsiest of mankind may be
trusted not to commit the gross blunder of
tearing off the wisely assumed incognito of
the young officer, and setting him up before
his messmates and companions (in flat
defiance of the principle on which his own
parents have so considerately and so
sensibly acted) as a Prince of the Blood Royal,
who is not, and never can be, one of
themselves!

Alas! alas! the clumsiest of mankind
must and will blunder, to the end of the
world, even in the plainest and simplest
matters. Exactly as the disastrous
tradesman at home french-polished the chest, so
the disastrous diplomatic tradesmen, abroad,
french-polish Midshipman Alfred, the moment
they get hold of him, with a royal
reception.

The good ship Euryalus arrives in the
Bay of Tangier; and the royal midshipman
probably looks forward to a run on shore
along with some of his friends in the
gunroom. No such good fortune awaits him.
We learn from the correspondent of the
Gibraltar Chronicle, that Her Majesty's
Chargé d'Affaires, Mr. D. Hay, proceeded in
a Moorish—more properly, as we think, a
Mayorish—launch, to wait upon his Royal
Highness. Mr. D. Hay is instantly saluted
by eleven honorary explosions from the guns
of the Euryalus—not one of which, we regret
to find, was sufficiently powerful to blow him
back instantly to his office on shore. The
Prince disembarks (as midshipmen invariably
do) with twenty-one honorary explosions
from the joyful town; which are
immediately returned (captains being always
particularly attentive where salutes to their
midshipmen are concerned) by more
explosions from the Euryalus. His Royal
Highness—Midshipman Alfred no longer—is
received by a perfect Corporation of civil
and military authorities. Saddle-horses are
in attendance; but the Prince not being
quite nautical enough yet to get on
horseback the moment he gets on shore, walks
up to his quarters with his wearisome escort
after him. The same day he has to make
calls of ceremony on the minister and the
Governor; and, the next morning, by way of
showing him a particularly interesting and
useful sight to a sailor, he is taken into the
country to witness the manœuvring of a large
body of cavalry—possibly, the Horse Marines
—in which case, we think it hard on the ship's
company not to have invited them all to see
the review. It is only fair to the authorities
to conclude by mentioning that they seem to
have remembered, at the eleventh hour, that
they had a midshipman to deal with, and
that they then did what they could to gratify
the Prince's sailor-like enthusiasm for
the fair sex, by taking him to see the
marriage of a beautiful young Jewess.
Shortly afterwards, he appears to have been
happily rescued from the civil and military
Corporation; to have got back to his ship;
and to have there re-assumed, let us hope, the
natural position in which he had been placed
by his parents, and from which the blundering
local authorities had done their
mischievous utmost to separate him.

Similar exhibitions of ludicrous ostentation
and wretched taste took place at Lisbon and at
Malta—with this noticeable difference,
however, that the reception at Lisbon was directed
by a foreign sovereign, and was, on that very
account, an excusable piece of folly. The King
of Portugal might naturally enough fall into
the mistake of supposing that he was bound
out of common politeness (to say nothing of
common regard for his own diplomatic
interests) to take formal public notice of the
Queen's son, as some return for the attention
which he himself received from the Court
when he visited this country. The King of
Portugal was not to be expected to feel with
Englishmen on such a purely national question
as that involved in the professional education
of the Prince. For these reasons we can look
composedly enough on the arrival of the
Portuguese Royal Barge alongside of the
Euryalus; and we can be well content to be
merely amused by the reported astonishment
of everybody at the alacrity with which the
Prince jumped into the barge—an astonishment
arising, we presume, from a general
idea that the descent of a Queen's son from
a Queen's ship's side, could only be
accomplished by a species of solemn procession,
or by a stage-walk, or by any other means,
except the means natural to a lively lad
of fourteen who can make good use of his
legs.

But the case is altered, when we get to
Malta. Here, in an English possession, where
the authorities had no excuse for awkwardly
thwarting the Queen's intentions, and
mischievously elevating her son above the free
sea-training and the impartial sea-discipline
which can alone make a sailor of him—here,
the sickening servility of these receptions of
the young Prince reached its climax. The
governor, the council, the judges, the
archbishop, the Protestant bishop, the clergy, the
nobility, and all the other grandees in the
island received the midshipman in solemn
assembly on the steps of the palace. Whether