they fell on their knees at his approach, or
whether they walked backwards till they
got in-doors, is not mentioned—but it is
asserted, quite seriously, that a levée was
held; and that, wherever the Prince went,
there a procession persistently went with him,
both before and behind. There was a ball,
too (the Midshipman's partners duly
chronicled), and an illumination; and there would
have been more to-do, if the Midshipman had
not "greatly chagrined" the Maltese, by
graciously condescending to allow his Captain
to proceed on his cruise! But the crowning
absurdity of all was accomplished by making
the midshipman of the Euryalus publicly
review the troops of the garrison. When we
had arrived at this part of the newspaper
narrative, nothing else that it might have
contained would have astonished us. After
reading of all the soldiers in Malta being
reviewed by a sailor of the age of fourteen, we
should not have felt the least surprised at
being further informed of the governor
boxing the compass, the judges holystoning
the decks, or the Archbishop borrowing the
boatswain's whistle, and piping all hands, out
of compliment to the Prince, in the very
pulpit itself.

What is to stop this fawning perversion
of Prince Alfred from the plain professional
purpose to which his parents have so wisely
devoted him? Who is to prevent these
abject authorities from doing their best to
spoil a frank, straightforward, natural lad,
who is promising so well at the fair outset of
his career? It is not easy to suggest an
answer to these questions. How are people,
who have no tact, no taste, no natural sense of
what is appropriate and no instinctive terror
of what is ridiculous—who seem to be
influenced, partly, by the childish pleasure of
putting on fine clothes, with the adult folly
superadded of feeling proud at publicly
exhibiting them; and, partly by the imperious
necessity of cringing and crawling, which
is the motive power that works in mean
natures—how are such people as these to be
reached by any ordinary process of
remonstrance? Argument, entreaty, reproof,
contempt; the pen of the writer, the tongue of
the orator, are all shivered alike against the
adamantine insensibility to every species of
intellectual attack which distinguishes the
genuine Flunkey nature. The one idea which
occurs to us, in connection with this very
disheartening part of the subject—and which
we beg leave, in conclusion, to express with
all possible respect—is, that the Queen
herself might possibly come to the rescue of her
son before it is too late to save him. Her
Majesty has been pestered with tens of
thousands of Addresses from her subjects. What
if she were suddenly to turn the tables, and
actually present her subjects with an Address
from herself? May we hope to be excused, if,
following out this idea, we venture to lay
the following few lines at the foot of the
Throne, as a rough sketch of the new kind
of Royal Address which we are bold enough
to suggest?

ADDRESS FROM THE QUEEN TO CERTAIN OF HER
SUBJECTS IN OFFICE.

MAY IT PLEASE YOUR FLUNKEYSHIPS,—I, your
much-wearied and much-persecuted Sovereign, do
hereby beg and entreat that you will, for the
future, allow my second son to pursue his profession
in peace and quietness, unencumbered and
unperverted by Receptions, which separate him from his
messmates, among whom I wish him to mingle as
one of themselves. Governors, Generals, Admirals,
Archbishops, Authorities civil and military,
Corporations of every degree of obesity,—be so good as to
learn, once for all, from your Queen, that true
loyalty is one of the forms of true politeness, in
which the delicacies of restraint, and the graces of
good-sense, count among the chiefest and the most
necessary of courteous accomplishments.
Understand, distinctly, that when I send my son to sea
as a midshipman, it is a flat contradiction of my
intentions for you to receive him as a Prince.
Reserve your spare gunpowder, therefore, for my
enemies; keep your fine clothes and your
processions for yourselves; and by no means consider it
any part of your duty towards Midshipman Alfred
to spoil a good sailor by reminding him, to no
earthly purpose, that you are Flunkeys and that he
is a Prince.

If some such pithy expostulation as this
should ever happen, under an extraordinary
stress of circumstances, to be prepared by
direction of the Queen, there is no office
within the gift of the Sovereign which it
would give us half so much pleasure to
receive as the useful, enviable, and patriotic
office of presenting the Address.

A YORKSHIRE TRAGEDY.

HE had always been harsh with us, and
we hated him.

I don't know why my father appointed
him our guardian. No two men could have
been more unlike, nor had they associated
much together. One, a high-spirited, open-
hearted, improvident country squire; the
other, a hard, passionate, sullen man, whose
dogged self-will seldom deferred to the
opinions or feelings of others. Little
sympathy could have existed between them. I
believe, too, that he was averse to my father's
union with his sister, prophesying that she
would live to repent marrying mad Jack
Holderness. That is our family name. It is
a right Yorkshire one, and has been known
in those parts any time these five hundred
years. Only the other day I found it in
Chaucer.

She did not repent, however. My father
might ride and drink hard, as most
Yorkshire squires did in his day, but he was
always kind to her and her children. And
if the hall—never a very orderly place—was
sometimes turned inside out by a party of
boosy fox-hunters, its ordinary aspect