The duke established himself at Camberwell Green, and made it his earliest care to write to the Duchess of Angouleme, soliciting her good offices on behalf of her unfortunate brother, who had been so vilely treated by the government of Louis Philippe, and had been cast out from the country over which he should have ruled.  In England he devoted himself to the manufacture of fireworks and explosive shells; and while he obtained the commendation of the authorities at Woolwich for his ingeniously-contrived obuses, aroused the ire of the inhabitants of Camberwell, who could not sleep because of the continuous explosion of concussion-shells on his premises.  They summoned him before the magistrates as a nuisance, and he transferred his establishment to Chelsea.  Here the emissaries, or supposed emissaries, of the French king, pursued him.  An attempt was made to shoot him, and he made it a pretext for leaving a country where his life was not safe, and retired to Delft, in Holland, where he died in very humble circumstances, on the 10th of August, 1844.

AUGUSTUS MEVES—­SOI-DISANT LOUIS XVII.  OF FRANCE.

Bloomsbury has been equally honoured with Camberwell and Chelsea in providing a home for a pretended dauphin of France, and for a dauphin whose pretensions are not allowed to lapse, although he has himself sunk into the grave, but are persistently presented before the public at recurring intervals by his sons.  The story which he told, and which they continue to tell, is a curious jumble of the inventions which preceded it—­a sort of literary patchwork, without design or pattern, and a flimsy covering either for self-conceit or imposture.

In this case the tale is, that, about September, 1793, Tom Paine, who was then a member of the National Convention, wrote to England to a Mrs. Carpenter to bring to Paris a deaf and dumb boy for a certain purpose.  Deaf and dumb boys are not easily procurable, and ladies, when entrusted with mysterious missions, have an inveterate habit of communicating them to their personal friends.  Mrs. Carpenter knew a Mrs. Meves, a music teacher, and hastened to inform her of the strange instructions which she had received from France, and the pair set out to find a child to suit the requirements of Paine.  They failed, and Mrs. Meves in her chagrin told her husband of their failure.  That worthy, who was then resident in Bloomsbury Square, had a son, supposed to be illegitimate, living in his house.  The lad had been born in 1785, was about the age required, was in delicate health, and a burden to his father, and there was no apparent reason why he should not occupy the precarious position intended for the deaf and dumb boy, at least until a mute could be found to take his place.  Mr. Meves, therefore, actuated by these ideas, proceeded to France, and, as those who now bear his name assert, succeeded in procuring an interview with Marie-Antoinette in her dungeon in the Conciergerie, where he made the illustrious sufferer a vow of secrecy respecting her son, which he kept to the latest hour of his existence.  And, lest there should be any doubt about this interview, it is added that many loyalists, both before and after, penetrated into the gloom of her prison-cell, and all but one contrived to evade being detected.