We have rejoiced, as beseemed us, at the birth of the little Prince; it now becomes our grave moral duty to read a lesson of forbearance to those enthusiastic people who—­especially if they have money—­may by an excess of the principle of loyalty put in peril their personal freedom.  Let them not take confidence from the safety enjoyed by the Athenaeum editor—­the poverty of the press may protect him.  If, however, he and other influential wizards of the broad sheet, succeed in making loyalty not a rational principle, but a mania—­if, day by day, and week by week, they insist upon deifying poor infirm humanity, exalting themselves in their own conceit, in their very self-abasement—­they may escape an individual accusation in the general folly.  When we are all mad alike—­when we all, with the editor of the Athenaeum, take our half-day’s watch at the little Prince’s cradle—­when every man and woman throughout the empire believe themselves making royal pap and airing royal baby-linen—­then, whatever fortune we may have we may be safe from the fate of poor WEEKS, the Greenwich pensioner, who, we repeat, is most unjustly confined for his notions of royalty, seeing that many of our contemporaries are still left at liberty to write and publish.  Poor dear little PRINCE! if fed and nourished from your cradle upwards upon such stuff as that pressed upon you since your birth, what deep, what powerful sympathies will be yours with the natures of your fellow-men—­what lofty notions of kingly usefulness, and kingly duty!

It may be that certain writers think they best oppose the advancing spirit of the time—­questioning as it does the “divinity” that hedges the throne—­by adopting the worse than foolish adulation of a by-gone age.  In a silly flippant book just published—­a thing called Cecil—­the author speaks of the first appearance of VICTORIA in the House of Lords.  He says—­

“An unaccountable feeling of trust rose in my bosom.  I speak it not profanely—­[when a writer says this, be sure of it that, as in the present case, he goes deep as he can in profanation]—­when I say that the idea of the yet unknown Saviour, a child among the Doctors of the Temple, occurred spontaneously to my mind!”

Now this book has been daubed with honey; the writer has been promised “an European reputation” (Madame LAFFARGE has a reputation equally extensive), and he is at this moment to be found upon drawing-tables, whose owners would scream—­or affect to scream—­as at an adder, at SHELLEY.  Nay, Shelley’s publisher is found guilty of blasphemy in the Court of Queen’s Bench; and that within these few months.  We should like to know Lord Denman’s opinions of Mr. BOONE.  What would he say of Queen Victoria being compared to the Redeemer—­of Lord LONDONDERRY, et hoc genus omne, being “Doctors of the Temple?”

A writer in the Almanach des Gourmands says, in praise of a certain viand, “this is a dish to be eaten on your knees.”  There are writers who, with, goose-quill in hand, never approach royalty, but they—­write upon their knees!