be recovered, but the forfeiture of honour in a sovereign can never be retrieved.'"

The reported compromise: "We will pay your debts; we will complete Carlton House, but we cannot augment your income, until you are married." Until you are married! What a picture of meanness and degeneracy does this report exhibit! Administration and opposition concurring in nothing but unblushingly to palm a falsehood on the world. The conduct on neither side will bear the honest reasoning of a plain mind. You will not augment the income; you think it then sufficient. If sufficient, the debts should not have been contracted. If they should not have been contracted they should not be paid. Is there anything defective in this short argument? Perhaps not, but it is too rigorous; it suits better the coldness of a judge, than the affection of a parent.I think so too.

But his Majesty was a

son before he was a father. He therefore refuses to believe that the ministers seriously can be authorised to discharge the debts of the present Prince of Wales, while those of his grandfather, Frederick, forty years standing, remain unpaid.

This is indeed dexterous; but enough has been said to show the prince's situation.

I remember Sheridan's once stating in the House, from authority, that, "whatever had been the errors of a certain lady in point of faith, she adhered to them no longer," a declaration entirely nugatory, if the nation could never be affected by the consequences of her opinions. The tone, too, assumed by that lady, when, at her own instance, a choice had been made by a great personage, which she disposed of almost as soon as it was made (I allude to Mrs. Crouch), seemed to indicate power as well as caprice, in one who must be propitiated for sundry weighty reasons. But this had passed away, and however deeply it might offend the revered monarch, it had the apology, at first, of nature and passion, which did not equally sanction the long welcome afforded to every political opponent of that parent's government.

The Duke of York, the king's favourite son, had, with the full concurrence of his family, married the Princess Royal of Prussia; thus preceding his illustrious brother, the prince, in legitimate alliance by four years. This was a marriage about which there could not be two opinions, and there never was a doubt that her Royal Highness retained the perfect respect of her royal husband to the last hour of her existence. She died in

August, 1820, sincerely honoured by all ranks. It must have been deeply distressing to one who, like his Majesty the king, had no mistress but his wife, to hear of the very degrading connection which subsisted for a length of time between a prince so wedded, and a woman of the description of Mary Ann Clarke. Of an establishment, too, for such a person in Gloucester Place, which £10,000 a year, economically applied, could scarcely keep up; for which the duke's own disposable funds were inadequate, and no other resources could be found that did not in some way dishonour him. The result proved that the duke never had been able to supply this lady much beyond his credit, and upon a perception of her influence (if there was no invitation to do so) this audacious person undertook to put her noble friend's favour up to nearly public sale: to ask for appointments, and condition for equivalents, as to persons hardly known to her by name, and I fear, in some instances,

"To sell and mart her offices for gold

To undeservers."

Mary Ann Clarke was the daughter of people called Thompson, and born in an alley, communi.

cating with a worse, in Chancery Lane, and her infant years had every contamination that could proceed from the abodes of the most disgusting profligacy. Upon the death of her father her mother married a second husband, whose name was Farquhar; he was a compositor in the printing-office of Mr. Hughes; she had thus an early acquaintance with letters, and her stepfather gave her the best instruction in his power, with a view, under his own eye, to render her useful in reading copy' in the printing-office, to the corrector of the press. As Mr. Hughes was a printer in great practice, Mary Ann was never suffered to be idle. She must always have been fair, and even lovely; was uncommonly sprightly, but pursued her studies in the black art without injury to her character, under the control of Mr. Farquhar.

The overseer of Hughes's printing-office was a Mr. Day, and his son had not been insensible to the beauty and application of the fair reader of the house. He formed the generous design of

'Copy. The word is technical, and signifies the matter, whether in manuscript or print, which is given out to compositors to set up for a work in hand. Junius shows himself acquainted with the mysteries of the printing-house, I remember, by the use of this word. A stranger would never call the original, copy. "Let me know when you want more copy."

making her his wife, and, to render her a suitable helpmate, he sent her, at his own expense, to a boarding-school of eminence at Ham, in the county of Essex. She passed two years there, making the most rapid strides, for she went thither with that literal knowledge that such places, for the most part, never thoroughly teach; for the highly accomplished are often miserably deficient in the elements of their own language. But all that the school taught of elegant refinements —

"She took, as we take air,

Fast as 'twas ministered."

But her return showed the fallacy of all sage provisions in affairs of the heart. Miss Mary was neither grateful to her lover, nor disposed to apply her acquisitions in the way of business, which Mr. Day properly and systematically considered.

Her mother and her husband now changed their abode from the Bowl and Pin Alley to the ominous shelter of Black Raven Passage, Cursitor Street, Holborn. While in this situation, Mary Ann laid a pawnbroker under some sort of contribution, and in her seventeenth year she married a Mr. Joseph Clarke, the second son of a wealthy bricklayer, in Angel Court, Snow Hill. Destined