532 Notes of the Month on [May, 
cating Popism in his own small way, and telling us that Rome folerates 
Christianity ! 
So—old Hesse Homburg is gone. Young ladies, ye who sigh with 
envy when ye see red coated footmen standing behind huge yellow 
bodied coaches with the king’s arms on their pamnels, learn the moral 
of this grandeur! Lilies of the valley! sigh no more. Think: of the 
fate of the fair women dragged about in those same yellow bodied 
carriages. How would you like to live an eternal life at Windsor ; 
your tours and travels divided between a drive to Frogmore and a 
drive to the Lodge, with an intermediate visit to some dilapidated 
maid of honour, as much alive as the waxwork of Queen Elizabeth 
in the abbey, and to the full as amusing? You love flattery, gentle 
creatures, you to whom the visiting breath of the sweet south is too 
harsh, and whose souls pant for sylphs spreading their silken pinions 
in the regions of the vesper star. Daughters of love! how would you 
relish flattery from the wrinkled lips of old staff-majors, and generals 
that carried your grandmother’s lap-dog ; from old mummies, ill pre- 
served, and brains as dry as if they were stuffed for preservation in a 
museum? Then, angelic creatures ! you pine for husbands, lovely youths, 
light as zephyrs, perfumed like roses, ever eloquent, like the Marquis 
of Bute; desperately fond, like the Marquis of Worcester ; and 
smiling for ever, like the Countess St. Antonio and her new set of patent 
teeth. Yet, lovely aspirants, look to the desperate reality—see one of 
those royal virgins, those tulips of the field of England’s beauty, those 
happy creations of kings and queens in their days of youth and glory— 
see her married to the Prince of Wirtemberg, the “largest animal that 
walked the shaking earth,” as the divine Milton says; a lover, of whom 
the poets of England wrote these moral lines :— 
“ Tf flesh is grass, as parsons say, 
« Old Wirtemberg would make a load of hay.” 
‘This large lover had been a husband before, and was reported not to be 
much better when he came wooing our eldest princess: the story, in his 
own capital, being, that he had a wife still living, but dungeoned some- 
where or other from his having taken a dislike to her. Old George, our 
late honest king, who never took an oath but with the intention to keep 
it, nor when he had taken it, suffered any man nor woman neither, to. 
tamper with either him or it, made a serious business of this report, and 
the fat duke had no slight trouble in bringing evidence to his not having 
been guilty of bigamy. However, the match took place, the princess 
was tied to her prince, and the two were packed up and sent off to 
Germany. Thirty years passed before the exile returned for a day to 
her family, and then only to find the king and queen dead, every human 
being, whom she had known gay, handsome, and young, transformed 
into meagre and old cats and spaniels, or fatted to a degree indicative 
of nothing but the quantity of food that is served up in England for 
the noble. 
Then came the bride of grey Hesse Homburg. If Wirtemberg was 
the fattest of Sovereign Dukes, Homburg was the most ferocious 
looking of Christened beings. The wolf might have said to him, 
‘Thou art my brother,” and the buffalo, “Thou art. my cousin- 
