Why is wit like a Chinese lady’s foot?—­Because brevity is the sole of it!

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THE PRINCE OF WALES.—­HIS FUTURE TIMES.

A private letter from Hanover states that, precisely at twelve minutes to eleven in the morning on the ninth of the present November, his Majesty King ERNEST was suddenly attacked by a violent fit of blue devils.  All the court doctors were immediately summoned, and as immediately dismissed, by his Majesty, who sent for the Wizard of the North (recently appointed royal astrologer), to divine the mysterious cause of this so sudden melancholy.  In a trice the mystery was solved—­Queen Victoria “was happily delivered of a Prince!” His Majesty was immediately assisted to his chamber—­put to bed—­the curtains drawn—­all the royal household ordered to wear list slippers—­the one knocker to the palace was carefully tied up—­and (on the departure of our courier) half a load of straw was already deposited beneath the window of the royal chamber.  The sentinels on duty were prohibited from even sneezing, under pain of death, and all things in and about the palace, to use a bran new simile, were silent as the grave!

“Whilst there was only the Princess Royal there were many hopes.  There was hope from severe teething—­hope from measles—­hope from hooping-cough—­but with the addition of a Prince of Wales, the hopes of Hanover are below par.”  But we pause.  We will no further invade the sanctity of the sorrows of a king; merely observing, that what makes his Majesty very savage, makes hundreds of thousands of Englishmen mighty glad.  There are now two cradles between the Crown of England and the White Horse of Hanover.

We have a Prince of Wales!  Whilst, however, England is throwing up its million caps in rapture at the advent, let it not be forgotten to whom we owe the royal baby.  In the clamourousness of our joy the fact would have escaped us, had we not received a letter from Colonel SIBTHORP, who assures us that we owe a Prince of Wales entirely to the present cabinet; had the Whigs remained in office, the infant would inevitably have been a girl.

For our own part—­but we confess we are sometimes apt to look too soberly at things—­we think her Majesty (may all good angels make her caudle!) is, inadvertently no doubt, treated in a questionable spirit of compliment by these uproarious rejoicings at the sex of the illustrious little boy, who has cast, if possible, a new dignity upon Lord Mayor’s day, and made the very giants of Guildhall shoot up an inch taller at the compliment he has paid them of visiting the world on the ninth of November.  In our playful enthusiasm, we have—­that is, the public We—­declared we must have a Prince of Wales—­we should be dreadfully in the dumps if the child were not a Prince—­the Queen must have a Prince—­a bouncing Prince—­and nothing but a Prince.  Now might not an ill-natured