120,000l. for having boasted (among other things) that he had had children by Queen ELIZABETH (by the way, the virginity of Royal BETSY has before been questioned)—that he intended to marry Queen VICTORIA, and that, in fact, not GEORGE THE THIRD but WEEKS THE FIRST was the father of Queen CHARLOTTE’S offspring. Now, what is all this, but loyalty in excess? Is it not precisely the same feeling that takes the editor of the Athenæum half of every day from his family, spellbinding him at the cradle of the Duke of CORNWALL? Cannot our readers just as easily believe the pensioner as the editor? We can.

“He told me he was going to marry the Queen” (thus speaks Sir R. DOBSON, chief medical officer of Greenwich Hospital, of poor WEEKS), “and I had him cupped and treated as an insane patient!” Can the editor hope to escape blood-letting and a shaven head? “He told me he was going to dine to-day at Buckingham Palace.” Thus spoke WEEKS. “Half the day at least we are in fancy at the Palace;” thus boasteth the Athenæum. The pensioner is found “incapable of managing himself or his affairs:” the editor continues to review books and write articles! “He (WEEKS) also said he had once horse-whipped a lion until it became afraid of him!” Where is CARTER—where VAN AMBURGH, if not in Bedlam? Lucky, indeed, is it for the editor of the Athenæum that his weekly miscellany (wherein he thinks he sometimes horse-whips lions) is not quite worth 120,000l. Otherwise, certain would be his summons to Gray’s-inn.

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 Athenæum 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 Athenæum, 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!

Q.

PUNCH’S PENCILLINGS.—No. XXII.