scandal has ever tinged his name. Of how many English princes could
this be said, in days when Figaro, quill in hand, inclines his ear to
every key-hole?

Upon the one action that were well obliterated from his record I need
not long insist. It seems that the wife of an aged ex-Premier came to
have an audience and pay her respects. Hardly had she spoken when the
Prince, in a fit of unreasoning displeasure, struck her a violent blow
with his clenched fist. Had His Royal Highness not always stood so far
aloof from political contention, it had been easier to find a motive
for this unmannerly blow. The incident is deplorable, but it belongs,
after all, to an earlier period of his life; and, were it not that no
appreciation must rest upon the suppression of any scandal, I should
not have referred to it. For the rest, I find no stain, soever faint,
upon his life. The simplicity of his tastes is the more admirable for
that he is known to care not at all for what may be reported in the
newspapers. He has never touched a card, never entered a play-house.
In no stud of racers has he indulged, preferring to the finest blood-
horse ever bred a certain white and woolly lamb with a blue riband to
its neck. This he is never tired of fondling. It is with him, like the
roebuck of Henri Quatre, wherever he goes.

Suave and simple his life is! Narrow in range, it may be, but with
every royal appurtenance of delight, for to him Love's happy favours
are given and the tribute of glad homage, always, here and there and
every other where. Round the flower-garden at Sandringham runs an old
wall of red brick, streaked with ivy and topped infrequently with
balls of stone. By its iron gates, that open to a vista of flowers,
stand two kind policemen, guarding the Prince's procedure along that
bright vista. As his perambulator rolls out of the gate of St. James's