the Santissimi Apostoli. And now, I cannot help seeing a
certain strange appropriateness in the fact that the image of that
mouthing and gesticulating half-witted creature should be connected in
my mind with the house to which, with pomp of six-horse coaches and
scarlet outriders, Charles Edward Stuart conducted his bride.

Illustration: CHARLES EDWARD STUART
_From a pastel, painter unknown, once in the possession of the
heir of the Countess of Albany's heir Fabre. Now in the possession
of Mrs. Horace Walpole, of Heckfield Place, Winchfield, Hants._

For the beautiful and brilliant youth who had secretly left that palace
twenty-four years before to re-conquer his father's kingdom, the gentle
and gallant and chivalric young prince of whose irresistible manner and
voice the canny chieftains had vainly bid each other beware when he
landed with his handful of friends and called the Highlanders to arms;
the patient and heroic exile, singing to his friends when the sea washed
over their boat and the Hanoverian soldiers surrounded their cavern or
hovel, who had silently given Miss Macdonald that solemn kiss which she
treasured for more than fifty years in her strong heart--that Charles
Edward Stuart was now a creature not much worthier and not much less
repulsive than the poor idiot whom I still see, flinging about his
palsied hands and gobbling with his speechless mouth, beneath the
windows of the Stuart palace. The taste for drinking, so strange in a
man brought up to the age of twenty-three among the proverbially sober
Italians, had arisen in Charles Edward, a most excusable ill habit in
one continually exposed to wet and cold, frequently sleeping on the damp
ground, ill-fed, anxious, worn out by over-exertion in flying before his
enemies, during those frightful months after the defeat at Culloden,
when, with a price of thirty thousand pounds upon his head, he had
lurked in the fastnesses of the Hebrides. We hear that on the eve of his
final escape from Scotland, his host, Macdonald of Kingsburgh, prevented
the possible miscarriage of all their perilous plans only by smashing
the punch-bowl over which the Pretender, already more than half drunk,
had insisted upon spending the night. Still more significant is the
fact, recorded by Hugh Macdonald of Balshair, that when Charles Edward
was concealed in a hovel in the isle of South Uist, the prince and his
faithful followers continued drinking (the words are Balshair