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 Prince of Wales and the Prince of good Fellows?  And whereas the reigns of other potentates are signalised by bloodshed and war, the time of the Prince will be glorified by cooking and good cheer.  His drum-sticks will be the drum-sticks of turkeys—­his cannon, the popping of corks.  In his day, even weavers shall know the taste of geese, and factory-children smack their lips at the gravy of the great sirloin.  Join your glasses! brandish your carving-knives! cry welcome to the Prince of Wales! for he comes garnished with all the world’s good things.  He shall live in the hearts, and (what is more) in the stomachs of his people!

Q.

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PROPER PRECAUTION.

Everybody is talking of the great impropriety that has been practised in keeping gunpowder within the Tower; and the papers are blowing up the authorities with astounding violence for their alleged laxity.  “Gunpowder,” say the angry journalists, “ought only to be kept where there is no possibility of a spark getting to it.”—­We suggest the bottom of the Thames, as the only place where, in future, this precious preparation can be securely deposited.