albeit the bridegroom was over thirty years of age, and his brilliant English wife was the young widow of a former husband. But there was 'heart' in the whole matter. England had known of no such hero as Edward, from his youth up, since the days of King Arthur, and all the realm of beauty, it is said, would have been hard put to it to produce altogether such a peerless lady as Joan;—a little too sharp, perhaps, with her wit, which sometimes made good Queen Philippa look serious. But England loved the pair, and the pair loved one another. What joyous house they kept,-not in Pall Mall! but in their princely mansion between Crooked Lane end and Fish Street Hill! What gay and rather costly doings-for Joan, it must be said, was a lady who loved such doingswent on at their palace at Berkhampstead! what ridings, and joustings, and laughing, and lovemaking, about that smaller bower they built at Prince's Risborough! The moat near the little Buckinghamshire church there, marks one part of the site where dwelt together in love and mirthfulness the first of our married Princes and Princesses of Wales. "The next case of marriage was, according to some, a love-match too, but according to others, and far more probably, a match of convenience, namely, that of the fugitive Prince of Wales, Edward, son of Henry the Sixth, with that wealthiest and most hapless of co-heiresses, Lady Anne Neville, daughter of Warwick, the King-maker. This wedding was celebrated at Amboise, in France, with great outward show of rejoicing, in which England here took no part. A few months later, in 1471, the Prince of Wales came hither to win back a crown for his father and a home for his wife; but the young husband, not yet nineteen, fell at Tewkesbury; and the young Duke of Gloucester, then of the same age, subsequently took the widow unto himself, and proved not so indifferent a husband as romance and history would have us believe. "The next bridegroom-prince was younger still than the last. Arthur, son of Henry the Seventh, was but fifteen years of age when, in 1501, he married that vivacious Katharine of Arragon, who had been six months on her journey between the Alhambra and St. Paul's. All London was in wild hilarity at this Spanish match; the city, drinking, dancing, and dressed in its best, celebrated it by night and by day; the Court kept up the wedding festival for a whole brilliant, weary, and dissipated fortnight; while the Church seemed to have tumbled from propriety in the excess of its orthodox jollification. Had this newly-married Prince and Edward, Henry VI. son of Arthur, son of Henry VII. Princess of Wales quietly gone down to young Arthur's moated manor at White Waltham, good might have come of it. They repaired, however, to Ludlow Castle, and there the solemn young bridegroom-what with study, and state solemnities and tiring ceremonials, and Katharine, who was imposing, exacting, super-vivacious, able to dance down a dozen of such gallants as her husband, and always oppressive-fairly died of it all in five months, as might well have been expected...... "And then follows Brunswick; the first Prince of Wales of which house-he who was afterGeorge II. wards George the Second-was married to the clever Caroline Wilhelmina, at the age of His eldest son twenty-two, and long before he was raised to that title...... "Frederick, the eldest son of George the Second, did not appear in England till after his father's accession, and his own creation as Prince of Wales." In 1736, when in his twenty-ninth year, "a treaty was concluded, which gave him for a wife the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. Nearly two centuries and a half had elapsed since a Prince and Princess of Wales had come from the altar to be greeted by the people in England. The ceremony, accordingly, raised as much excitement in London as that of Arthur and Katharine......There was a banquet of course, but the most splendid part of the day's ceremony was the bidding 'good night,' at the end of it, to the wedded pair, in their sleepingroom. There were assembled a very mob, from King and Queen downward to pages of the chamber, of the most gorgeously and extravagantly dressed lords and ladies, and aristocratic swains and nymphs, that ever met to wish happiness to a bride and bridegroom. The former sat up on her throne-like couch, halfhidden in clouds of muslin and of lace, while the Prince of Wales, in a dressing-gown of stiff costly gold brocade, slipped from group to group, and fantastically answered the greetings which saluted him by the way. And therewith the day came to an end. "After altogether another fashion were the George IV. next Prince and Princess of Wales made man and wife. The eldest son of George the Third, born in 1762, was as precocious as Prince Henry. At eighteen he was transmitting ridiculous loveletters to Perdita Robinson. At three-andtwenty he turned from the feet of Mrs. Crouch to pay homage at those of Mrs. Fitzherbert, a lady hard upon thirty years of age, and already the widow of two husbands. Of this lady, after a sort of wooing which savours of the extravaganza, he became the third husband,―joined to her in holy matrimony, contrary to profane Act of Parliament, by a venturous Protestant clergyman, in the Catholic lady's back drawing-room! How this rash couple looked at the time, and the very ring with which they were wedded, may now be seen in the Loan Exhibition at South Kensington. But here was a pseudo Princess of Wales who was not wanted; and ten years later another was found for the Prince, who was far less worthy, and perhaps far more cruelly wronged. When Caroline of Brunswick and her future husband met at the altar, they had not seen one another before that day...... There is this remarkable in the marriage of the heir apparent of George the Third, that he is the only one who, marrying when Prince of Wales, subsequently ascended the throne...... "In the House of Brunswick may this happier course, thus commenced, be henceforth the rule. The coming match has happy auspices. The The Princess Princess Alexandra, daughter of Prince Christian of Denmark, in addition to external and intellectual qualities, has earned golden opinions The Prince at home, as a 'good daughter,' and the Prince of Wales. of Wales, especially in circumstances of late of Alexandra. some difficulty, has shown himself a cheerfully dutiful son. His training, too, and his experiences have been such as none of his royal predecessors ever enjoyed, and he is known to have profited by both. He is the first Prince of |