prime of her beauty, and eager, as soon as decency
permitted, to enter the matrimonial lists again.

About this time Horace Walpole, who had a keen eye for female charms,
describes her as

"extremely pretty, very well-made, with the most amorous
eyes in the world, and eyelashes a yard long. Coquette
beyond measure, artful as Cleopatra, and completely
mistress of all her passions and projects. Indeed,
eyelashes three-quarters of a yard shorter would have
served to conquer such a head as she has turned."

In another portrait Walpole says:

"There was something so bewitching in her languishing
eyes, which she could animate to enchantment if she
pleased, and her coquetry was so active, so varied, and
yet so habitual, that it was difficult not to see through
it, and yet as difficult to resist it. She danced
divinely, and had a great deal of wit, but of the satiric
kind."

Such were the charms and witchery of Mrs Horton when the lascivious
young Prince, who was still a boy, was first dazzled by her beauty at
Brighton; and when, in fact, she was on the eve of smiling on the suit
of one of the legion of lovers who swelled her retinue, one General
Smith, a handsome man with a seductive rent-roll to add to his
attractions. But the moment the Prince began to cast admiring eyes at
the young widow the General's fate was sealed. She had no fancy to go to
her grave plain "Mrs Smith" when a duchess's coronet (and a Royal one to
boot) was dangled so alluringly before her eyes.

For from the first she had made up her mind that she would be the
Prince's legal wife, and no light-o'-love to be petted and flung aside
when he chose, butterfly-like, to flit to some other flower; and this
she made abundantly clear to Henry Frederick. Her favours--after a
period of coquetry and coy reluctance--were at his disposal; but the
price to be paid for them was a wedding-ring--nothing less. And such was
the infatuation she had inspired that the Duke--flinging scruples and
fears aside, consented. One October day they took boat to Calais, and
were there made man and wife. The widow had caught her Prince and meant
the world to know she was a Princess.

For a few indecisive weeks the Duke put off the evil day of announcing
his marriage to his brother, the King, and to his mother, the Dowager
Princess of Wales, whose frowns he dreaded still more. But his Duchess
was inexorable. She de