A pleasing instance of the ultra-German etiquette fomented by Prince Albert was told me by an eye-witness of the scene.  The Prime Minister and his wife were dining at Buckingham Palace very shortly after they had received an addition to their family.  When the ladies retired to the drawing-room after dinner, the Queen said most kindly to the Premier’s wife, “I know you are not very strong yet, Lady——­; so I beg you will sit down.  And, when the Prince comes in, Lady D——­ shall stand in front of you.”  This device of screening a breach of etiquette by hiding it behind the portly figure of a British Matron always struck me as extremely droll.

Courtly etiquette, with the conditions out of which it springs and its effect upon the character of those who are subjected to it, has, of course, been a favourite theme of satirists time out of mind, and there can scarcely be a more fruitful one.  There are no heights to which it does not rise, nor depths to which it does not sink.  In the service for the Queen’s Accession the Christological psalms are boldly transferred to the Sovereign by the calm substitution of “her” for “Him.”  A few years back—­I do not know if it is so now—­I noticed that in the prayer-books in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor all the pronouns which referred to the Holy Trinity were spelt with small letters, and those which referred to the Queen with capitals.  So much for the heights of etiquette, and for its depths we will go to Thackeray’s account of an incident stated to have occurred on the birth of the Duke of Connaught: 

    “Lord John he next alights. 
       And who comes here in haste? 
     The Hero of a Hundred Fights,
       The caudle for to taste.

    “Then Mrs. Lily the nuss,
       Towards them steps with joy;
     Says the brave old Duke, ’Come tell to us. 
       Is it a gal or boy?’

    “Says Mrs. L. to the Duke,
       ‘Your Grace, it is a Prince’
     And at that nurse’s bold rebuke
       He did both laugh and wince.”

Such was the etiquette of the Royal nursery in 1850; but little Princes, even though ushered into the world under such very impressive circumstances, grow up into something not very unlike other little boys when once they go to school.  Of course, in former days young Princes were educated at home by private tutors.  This was the education of the Queen’s uncles and of her sons.  A very different experience has been permitted to her grandsons.  The Prince of Wales’s boys, as we all remember, were middies; Princess Christian’s sons were at Wellington; Prince Arthur of Connaught is at Eton.  There he is to be joined next year by the little Duke of Albany, who is now at a private school in the New Forest.  He has among his schoolfellows his cousin Prince Alexander of Battenberg, of whom a delightful story is current just now.[27] Like many other little boys, he ran short of pocket money, and wrote an ingenious letter