asked for the man who knew his bride.  It was honest Tom O’Bull, an Irish sailor, who by his interpreter Mr. James Hall, the supercargo, informed his highness that Mr. Bob Oliver of Sligo had a daughter christened of both his names, the fair miss Bob Oliver.[1] The prince by the plenitude of his power declared Tom a mandarin of the first class, and at Tom’s desire promised to speak to his brother the king of Great Ireland, France and Britain, to have him made a peer in his own country, Tom saying he should be ashamed to appear there without being a lord as well as all his acquaintance.

The prince’s passion, which was greatly inflamed by Tom’s description of her highness Bob’s charms, would not let him stay for a proper set of ladies from Pekin to carry to wait on his bride, so he took a dozen of the wives of the first merchants in Canton, and two dozen virgins as maids of honour, who however were disqualified for their employments before his highness got to St. Helena.  Tom himself married one of them, but was so great a favourite with the prince, that she still was appointed maid of honour, and with Tom’s consent was afterwards married to an English duke.

Nothing can paint the agonies of our royal lover, when on his landing at Dublin he was informed that princess Bob had quitted Ireland, and was married to nobody knew whom.  It was well for Tom that he was on Irish ground.  He would have been chopped as small as rice, for it is death in China to mislead the heir of the crown through ignorance.  To do it knowingly is no crime, any more than in other countries.

As a prince of China cannot marry a woman that has been married before, it was necessary for Mi Li to search the world for another lady equally qualified with miss Bob, whom he forgot the moment he was told he must marry somebody else, and fell equally in love with somebody else, though be knew not with whom.  In this suspence he dreamt, “that he would find his destined spouse, whose father had lost the dominions which never had been his dominions, in a place where there was a bridge over no water, a tomb where nobody ever was buried nor ever would be buried, ruins that were more than they had ever been, a subterraneous passage in which there were dogs with eyes of rubies and emeralds, and a more beautiful menagerie of Chinese pheasants than any in his father’s extensive gardens.”  This oracle seemed so impossible to be accomplished, that he believed it more than he had done the first, which shewed his great piety.  He determined to begin his second search, and being told by the lord lieutenant that there was in England a Mr. Banks,[2] who was going all over the world in search of he did not know what, his highness thought he could not have a better conductor, and sailed for England.  There he learnt that the sage Banks was at Oxford, hunting in the Bodleian library for a MS. voyage of a man who had been in the moon, which Mr. Banks thought must have been in the western ocean, where the moon sets, and which planet if he could discover once more, he would take possession of in his majesty’s name, upon condition that it should never be taxed, and so be lost again to this country like the rest of his majesty’s dominions in that part of the world.