eceived any invitation to the baptismal
ceremony: when Prince Prettyman is locked up in the steel tower,
provided only with the most wholesome food, the most edifying
educational works, and the most venerable old tutor to instruct and
to bore him, we know, as a matter of course, that the steel bolts and
brazen bars one day will be of no avail, the old tutor will go off in a
doze, and the moats and drawbridges will either be passed by His Royal
Highness's implacable enemies, or crossed by the young scapegrace
himself, who is determined to outwit his guardians, and see the wicked
world. The old King and Queen always come in and find the chambers
empty, the saucy heir-apparent flown, the porter and sentinels drunk,
the ancient tutor asleep; they tear their venerable wigs in anguish,
they kick the major-domo downstairs, they turn the duenna out of
doors--the toothless old dragon! There is no resisting fate. The
Princess will slip out of window by the rope-ladder; the Prince will
be off to pursue his pleasures, and sow his wild oats at the appointed
season. How many of our English princes have been coddled at home by
their fond papas and mammas, walled up in inaccessible castles, with
a tutor and a library, guarded by cordons of sentinels, sermoners, old
aunts, old women from the world without, and have nevertheless escaped
from all these guardians, and astonished the world by their extravagance
and their frolics? What a wild rogue was that Prince Harry, son of the
austere sovereign who robbed Richard the Second of his crown,--the youth
who took purses on Gadshill, frequented Eastcheap taverns with Colonel
Falstaff and worse company, and boxed Chief Justice Gascoigne's ears!
What must have been the venerable Queen Charlotte's state of mind when
she heard of the courses of her beautiful young Prince; of his punting
at gambling-tables; of his dealings with horse-jockeys; of his awful
doings with Perdita? Besides instances taken from our Royal Family,
could we not draw examples from our respected nobility? There was that
young Lord Warwick, Mr. Addison's stepson. We know that his mother
was severe, and his stepfather a most eloquent moralist, yet the young
gentleman's career was shocking, positively shocking. He boxed the
watch; he fuddled himself at taverns; he was no better than a Mohock.
The chronicles of that day contain accounts of many a mad prank which he
played, as we have legends of a still earlier date of the lawless fr