We have been favoured, among a series of pictures, with the following of George the Fourth, exhibited in his babyhood.  We are told that “all persons of fashion were admitted to see the Prince, under the following restrictions, viz.—­that in passing through the apartment they stepped with the greatest caution, and did not offer to touch his Royal Highness.  For the greater security in this respect, a part of the apartment was latticed off in the Chinese manner, to prevent curious persons from approaching too nearly.”

That lattice “in the Chinese manner” was a small yet fatal fore-shadowing of the Chinese Pavilion at Brighton—­of that temple, worthy of Pekin, wherein the Royal infant of threescore was wont to enshrine himself, not from the desecrating touch of the world, but even from the eyes of a curious people, who, having paid some millions toward manufacturing the most finished gentleman in Europe, had now and then a wish—­an unregarded wish—­to look at their expensive handiwork.

What different prognostics have we in the natal day of our present Prince of Wales!  What rational hopes from many circumstances that beset him.  The Royal infant, we are told, is suckled by a person “named Brough, formerly a housemaid at Esher.”  From this very fact, will not the Royal child grow up with the consciousness that he owes his nourishment even to the very humblest of the people?  Will he not suck in the humanising truth with his very milk?

And then for the Spanish treasure—­“hard food for Midas”—­that threw its jaundiced glory about the cradle of George the Fourth; what is that to the promise of plenty, augured by the natal day of our present Prince?  Comes he not on the ninth of November?  Is not his advent glorified by the aromatic clouds of the Lord Mayor’s kitchen?—­Let every man, woman, and child possess themselves of a Times newspaper of the 10th ult.; for there, in genial companionship with the chronicle of the birth of the Prince, is the luscious history of the Lord Mayor’s dinner.  We quit Buckingham Palace, our mind full of our dear little Queen, the Royal baby, Prince Albert—­(who, as The Standard informs us subsequently, bows “bare-headed” to the populace,)—­the Archbishop of Canterbury, Doctor Locock, the Duke of Wellington, and the monthly nurse, and immediately fall upon the civic “general bill of fare,”—­the real turtle at the City board.

Oh, men of Paisley—­good folks of Bolton—­what promise for ye is here!  Turkeys, capons, sirloins, asparagus, pheasants, pine-apples, Savoy cakes, Chantilly baskets, mince pies, preserved ginger, brandy cherries, a thousand luscious cakes that “the sense aches at!” What are all these gifts of plenty, but a glad promise that in the time of the “sweetest young Prince,” that on the birth-day of that Prince just vouchsafed to us, all England will be a large Lord Mayor’s table!  Will it be possible for Englishmen to dissassociate in their minds the